Week 7 (Book / Print)
Hobart and Schiffman, Printing and the rupture of classification
Per the authors, a shift to a print culture encouraged the transfer of the human capacity for memory from the person to the book. The codex, which was far easier to navigate than the scroll, functioned more like an ?information storehouse.? Today, we can even more readily observe how our communication technologies function as information storehouses, and how our capacity to remember has largely been handed over to these technologies. Nowadays, it's much more important to know where to find information and how to synthesize it than it is to be able to remember a lot of information, because information is so readily accessible. Lest I get called out for ignoring Plato, I'll give him a shout-out for his prescient observation that the printed word would eventually substitute for the human capacity of memory.
"The ease with which the young Descartes dismissed his education indicates the extent to which relativism had undermined commonplace thought by the early seventeenth century." How many times have I heard or been a part of conversations where instructors bemoan our undergraduates' lack of interest in education. Of course the situations aren't completely parallel (in a Euclidean way, at least), and lazy undergrads are no Descartes, but I wonder the extent to which this new explosion of information / information access could be having similar effects on our undergrads as print had on Descartes.
Briggs and Burke, The print revolution in context
B&B outline in vast detail the historical context of the print revolution. I find it interesting how the context of the print revolution is hardly different than the context of other technological revolutions, especially the new tech. / new media revolution. There are questions of regulation/censorship, private/public, industry/profit, multimodality, dangers/benefits, as well as control over the message. Of course, now that I'm writing this, it occurs to me--as it probably has occurred to you--that these weren't necessarily the questions people were concerned with back then. Rather, B&B are influenced by the questions we're asking today and apply those questions to print media, seeking out relevant anecdotes and examples as best fits the structure of their questions.
Manguel, The shape of the book
The alternate title here should be The ergonomics of the book. I really loved the descriptions of the reading machines developed to facilitate the use of this new technology, since we talk about ergonomics so much today, with relation to how much time we spend at our computers. Likewise, the design history of the book in some ways mirrors the design history of the computer, always trending towards portability and ubiquity. Of course, at the heart of the design history of the book is also the growth of an industry and the development of better manufacturing methods (like the computer), so my point here is that design is tied to both necessity and a profit-motive. If nobody was going to profit from better book design, then you can bet the design evolution of the book would have paused or at least slowed down considerably at that hypothetical point.
Garvey, Scissoring and scrapbooks
So, scrapbooking is still with us. I'm reminded of Benjamin's line in The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he claims that in an era of infinitely reproducible symbols/art/culture, we being to create our identities through the very symbols we select/purchase/choose to identify with. Benjamin, a Marxist critic, was making a point about consumer culture here, but it applies to information in general, I think. In an era with infinitely greater (and reproducible) information, we find a locus of control / interpretation / identity in the practice of scrapbooking. The difference between digital scrapbooking and print scrapbooking is that you don't destroy the original with digital scrapbooking. Now, here's an interesting (for me!) thought. Because print scrapbooking used a cut, rather than a copy, the amount of information in the world did not change through scrapbooking. Scrapbooking reappropriated the message and created a new message, but it did not leave the old message intact. Now, in an era of digital scrapbooking, the amount of information is always being added to. Scrapbooking is growth. It is not just the creation of new information; it is the addition to of new information. Scrapbooking is now additive. What this means for us is the obvious: that we have infinitely more information to deal with, and thus infinitely more scrapbooking to do in order to create our digital ethos.