Books and Print
"Printing and the Rupture of Classification" begins with the image of Montaigne, hapless, contemplating death, life, grief, and loss through the filter of 1,000 books, culminating in his work, Essays. This highlights Hobart and Schiffman's (1988) point that "This avalanche of books and ideas engendered not intellectual advancement but confusion, undercutting the traditional, classificatory means of information management"(p. 89). The point being made is that similar to the situation of a postmodern world in which moral judgment is no longer agreed upon. Hobart and Schiffman(1988) state that uncertainty of moral norms led to doubts about wisdom and that "Doubts about the ability to know the order of the world catalyzed a crucial change, away from taxonomic forms of information storage based on natural language and toward new ones based on a symbolic language of analytical abstraction"(p. 90). While the storage of information used to rely on spatializing and visualizing common-places for memory and the use of student notebooks recording information into logical hierarchies, the elimination of social consensus and the information overload of the printing era necessitated a different type of information storage. Hobart and Schiffman point to the existence of this overload in the form of list-makers such as Rabelaise, Montaigne, and Bodin, and the claim that while Montaigne was able to use his method of "essaying his mind with diversity" this was not possible for many others. In the end, Descartes, in his desire for order separated exact knowledge from wisdom "fostering two distinct intellectual cultures?the scientific and the humanistic?that would remain irreconcilable until our contemporary information age"(Hobart & Schiffman, 1988, p. 111). What most interested me in this piece is that today, while the two forms of intellectualism do remain distinct there has been a pushing back against the dualism of Descartes. Also, Englebart's theory of trails of information in the Memex machine seems to possibly tie both hierarchy and what might be a version of social common-places and individual association and analytical abstraction together? Additionally, mneumonists today still use the spatialization system where you memorize a room and store pieces of information in each of the room's visual components. Therefore, it is interesting as Hobart and Schiffman point out, that we are still trying to psychically and intellectually negotiate information overload today. (I also wonder if Franzen's The Corrections constitutes a modern-day Rabelaise of list-making.)
In the chapter on "The Print Revolution in Context," Briggs and Burke (2002) discuss various media and historical developments with the purpose of contextualizing the social, political, and individual implications of the printing press and movement of print. Because I am interested in aurality I thought it was interesting that after introducing the Ong/McLuhan discussion of print culture versus oral culture and the sixteenth century books and diagrams " 'which mean everything for the eye and nothing to the ear' because they cannot be read aloud"(Briggs & Burke, 2002, p. 16), there was a discussion about how print and oral culture interacted. The example of printed texts of songs posted on the walls of taverns to aid people in joining in, but the downside that they did not allow for flexibility for improvising was not surprising. However, I had never thought of a manuscript as an "interactive medium," where readers felt free to annotate the text, therefore making manuscripts or the glosses that Hobart and Schiffman refer to, the precursors of wikis or google docs? Also, the discussion of "clandestine communication" and reading as a "psychic mobility"(Briggs & Burke, 2002, p. 53) served as an important reminder that even since the birth of print culture we have been concerned with the idea of ethics of differentiated mobility, access, and the categorization of different "elites." Although, unlike in early print culture where you could be turned over to the Inquisition for "reading too much," the techno-elite of today is in no danger of being physically persecuted, and even in a social sense, as ostracizing the digitally advanced seems to be diminishing in the aforementioned "geek chic" movement. That difference in reception of those who read versus those who nowadays surf?hack?code?, as well as the statement that the print and Industrial Revolutions were "long" revolutions remains an important distinction for me between the print revolution and the digital media/mobile technologies revolution.
Manguel writes, in "The Shape of the Book" about the importance and power of a book formatted to fit in the reader's hand. This also connects back to our consideration of mobility. Not only is the book considered as a psychic mobility, but the portable book holds a similar power to the iphone of today, allowing the user to access information while physically moving about the country. Also, in the discussion of Aldus, there is an important balancing of the emergence of issues surrounding reproduction where the book no longer held a status of wealth or uniqueness, but in place of status the printed reproduction of identical copies of books afforded equal access of knowledge to those in possession of the book, (an idea that Berger talks about in relation to reproducing images). Finally, also surprising in this history of the format and shape of the book is the pervasiveness of the fetishizing of the book, in that Penguin Classics almost didn't come to being because the idea of selling books "next to socks and tea seemed ludicrous"(Manguel, 1996). This resistance to not only selling the book commonly but to the book still being reproduced in the sort of "leatherbond editions that should not go outside,"also made me think about the book as an fetishized object. This is the distinction Manovich talks about in the space of Myst where the screen is used as an interface, but the book is still fetishized in that in the game space the pages must still be collected even though the information is presented through a screen.
Finally, in discussing "Scissoring and Scrapbooks," Garvey(2003) talks about the act of scrapbooking which requires one to make choices in clipping from magazines and newspapers about which articles to save and which will be cut to pieces by the scissors or glued to the page (p. 207). As a student having made numerous collages for class projects, I was surprised that I had not thought of this choice of material in a theoretical way before. New media allows us to recombine and collage aspects of other works, images, text, and audio samples, but it does not pose quite the same issue of which to perserve and be able to access again, and which to lose forever. I thought that this was an interesting part of the narrative at the beginning. Also, in discussing the idea of the Index Rerum, Garvey's piece presents ideas that are common throughout the reading-- the issues presented in reading, digesting, assimilating information, storing information, and negotiating an information landscape that exploded following the development of print. As Garvey(2003) notes, the strategies all have in common "the desire to mark the path of one's own reading, to not pass through the field without leaving a trace, but to find one's way back to a desired spot"(p. 211). This is an issue we are still negotiating in our various conversations on citation styles, software (Endnote vs. Zotero vs. Refworks, etc,) and differing styles of note-taking and pdf archival. This article also reminded me (as Jacob notes) how software and browser ad-ons like del.icio.us and stumble-upon are related to older methods of social information gathering and "posting" such as scrapbooking, as well as differences between scrapbooking and "re-purposing" and "mashing" of today in terms of authorship in the example of the George W. Bush speech appropriating a quotation, but destroying its original context.