Week 7: Books and Print
Living organisms are historical structures: literally creations of history. They represent not a perfect product of engineering but a patchwork of odd sets pieced together when and where opportunities arose. ~Francois Jacob
I appropriated this quote from Gary Marcus who used it as an epigraph to his book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. I have no idea who Francois Jacob is or his work, but I liked his quotation and I wanted to use it as my own epigraph. Furthermore, I liked Marcus?s claim that the human mind is a evolutionary product that may not be the best, just the one that is, a la Deleuze?s interpretation of Leibniz?s best of all possible worlds. I like and cite both Francois Jacob and Marcus because they both suggest that our bodies and minds are a patchwork of evolutionary processes. In effect, our bodies and minds are the scrapbooks of evolution?taking what was the best of Nature and keeping it for later.
Therefore, perhaps our tendency to store interesting, important, or special information is an evolutionary product that demonstrates how our minds work and how they are put together through evolution. Vannevar Bush wanted his memex to capture the associative trails of our memories. He essentially desired a scrapbook that could crystallize our associative thoughts.
We might think that because we think associatively, there would be no need for narrative, only database. However, narrative, rather than opposing the process of scrapbooking, arises out of scrapbooking. That is, our need to scrapbook (or, our scrapbooking thought process) produces our need for narrative because we desire to make sense of our associative trails. We do not want to find ourselves like Hansel and Gretel: "A trail of crumbs or references may mark the way back, but more likely leaves the reader of the commonplace book with something new: a collection of passages that lead nowhere, but have become freestanding 'quotes' and sayings" (Gruber Gravey, p. 210). We do not want to live in the chaos of our minds, but rather in the narrative of our thoughts. Narrative, then, is not linear thinking, but rather a way to connect disparate thoughts.
The codex book solved the problem of unnatural linear thinking that the scroll imposed upon the reader. Hobart and Schiffman point out that scrolling through a papyrus scroll, which could be a huge volume, looking for a particular passage, is "a situation much like that of having to use a huge computer file without the benefit of search and retrieve function" (p. 91). They note that the codex book made it possible to consult manuscripts more easily. The codex book was/is random access memory (RAM). As such, Hobart and Schiffman suggest that "the codex had the potential to transform the manuscript from a cumbersome mnemonic aid to a readily accessible information storehouse" (p. 91). Similarly, Briggs and Burke highlight that "books changed in ways which facilitated skimming and browsing. Texts were increasingly divided into chapters and within chapters into paragraphs. Printed notes in the margin summarized the message of each section" (p. 53). Hobart and Schiffman also include the process of pagination in this development. The codex book augmented human intellect. Whereas the manuscript constrained our memories, the codex book allowed us to become more ourselves, to think more associatively and narratively.
Hobart and Schiffman also posit the books allowed people to think more critically by exposing people to a more diverse set of viewpoints. And at the same time, people no longer had to memorize everything that they might have wanted to use later. They just had to remember where to find it in a book, and they could use the apparatus of the book to do so. This ability, in turn, created the need for new desks that could display multiple books at a time, as Manguel shows. (By the way, why aren?t such desks more popular? I think I could use one, except I only have one computer.) More important, books ensured that we would have academia: "Written passages that were once part of a larger work enter into a half life as quotes appended as signature files to email as well, where their position suggests that they represent the uniqueness of the email writer?s thoughts, rather than their original author?s" (Gurber Garvey (p. 222). Appending quotes to emails is just a less academic version of what we do when we do research and write articles. We use quotes, i.e., other people?s thoughts, as evidence to support our own thoughts. Other authors are the authorities until we become authorities and someone quotes us. That?ll be the day. This is also one of the reasons why we cover our houses with bookshelves. Bookshelves are a form of scrapbooking.
Internetrification, then, only enhances and supplements the book because it allows us to do what we have always done with books?skimming and browsing?faster and more efficiently. Matt, Jacob, and others have pointed out how current Internet applications relate to scrapbooking. To these I would add other applications, like Evernote, Clipmarks, and iLeonardo, which are even more similar to scrapbooks. Whereas with Del.icio.us you usually bookmark the whole page, with these applications you can choose to bookmark just a part of it. These applications allow the user to highlight text or part of the screen and then store those clippings in either a personal or a public database. iLeonardo is especially interesting because it allows users to construct ?notebooks? around topics that interest them. For example, a user can clip everything she ever come across about synthetic biology and put it in one notebook. She can add commentary or explain how different articles relate to each other. She can share her notebooks with other users, and they can comment on it. The creators of iLeonardo hope it becomes a legitimate research tool. It reminds me of Bush?s memex.
All these social applications help users sift through the embarrassment of riches that is the internet. But this is not a new problem, as Briggs and Burke point out: "Since so many more books existed than could be read in a lifetime, readers had to be helped to discriminate by means of select bibliographies and, from the later seventeenth century, reviews of new publications" (p. 16).
I especially like Hobart and Schiffman?s insight that lists are a "sure sign of information overload?what we draw up when we have too much on our minds" (p. 104). I do not have evidence of this but there seems to be a proliferation of lists on the Internet: the list blog post is one of the most popular kinds.
And finally, Walter Benjamin writes, "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." The machine "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence" and in so doing produces a shift from the "cult value" of the image to its "exhibition value" (qtd. in Briggs and Burke, p. 32). Manguel asserts that the book eventually became ?a new luxury: a style based on the conventional beauty of everyday things.? How are books viewed nowadays? Do they have cult value or exhibition value? Do they retain the conventional beauty of everyday things?
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson