Week 7 Readings: Hobart & Schiffman, Briggs & Burke, Manguel, Garvey
?Information overload did not so much originate as culminate with printing,? write Hobart and Schiffman (1988, p. 90). By moving from printing on papyrus to parchment, books were produced as a codex (separate pages bound together with a cover) rather than a scroll. In codex form, a reader could easily consult a manuscript by flipping to the desired page or flipping through the pages to find the correct one. Commonplace notebooks were popular, encyclopedic volumes filled with common facts and sayings. As literacy rates and access to books increased, people were exposed to more (and often conflicting) ideas, as illustrated by the Michel de Montaigne example at the beginning of the article. As a result, commonplace books became less valuable and a new system of information management became necessary. Today commonplace books are returning to fashion in the form of the wiki. While we use our class wiki to create a bibliography of new media, I also have one for my radio station that includes information on how to update DJ profiles, operate the audio console, transfer files over our network and review CDs.
In ?The Shape of the Book,? Manguel (1996) discusses the origins of the pocket book, designed so one could literally put a book in his or her pocket. Manuscripts could be elaborate, done in calligraphy with unique illustrations. As books became more popular among the middle and lower classes, expensive handmade volumes were replaced with smaller, mass produced ones. As Manguel (1996) asserts, ?What counted above all,? for the owner of a pocket book, ?was the text, clearly and eruditely printed ? not a preciously decorated object? (p. 138). This also placed greater emphasis on the narrative instead of the presentation of the material. In direct contrast, the author also explains the development of the gift book for those in upper classes: ?Soon, enterprising booksellers started manufacturing small collections of poems in this manner ? little gift books whose merit lay less in the contents than in the elaborate embellishments? (p. 130). I have always found these little books (often sold at the counter of larger bookstores) to be cute, but extravagant. That is not surprising, as I personally value the context of a book more than its cover.
The scrapbook, as defined by Garvey (2003), is a different incarnation of the commonplace book. Unlike the scrapbooks we are used to today, which is essentially a book of memories filled with personal photos and stories, these scrapbooks are filled with news clippings and other items of interest. These are an example of repurposing old content in a new medium. ?Like quilters, scrapbook makers generated a new form along the way, creating the usefulness of the scraps by saving and classifying, and thus making them available for reuse? (p. 214, emphasis in original). Just as scraps of cloth are useless until they form a quilt, random newspaper or magazine clippings assume new meaning in the form of a scrapbook. YouTube and del.icio.us, where a user categories and shares bookmarks from a Web browser, are the modern manifestation of Garvey?s scrapbook, allowing an individual to collect material from different sources and publish it as something new.
From our week five readings on information and materiality, Hayles (1999) ponders the usefulness of information if it can only travel as fast as the horse carrying the message. Briggs and Burke (2005) revisit this topic through the reign of Charles V, who ruled parts of Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Peru from 1519-1558. This resulted in a ?paper empire,? which I believe means an empire so large one person could never have true authority over it all and that it needs a strong system of communication to keep going. Charles V?s son Phillip II spent much of his days reading and responding to documents from across his empire. ?The great problem was the length of time the documents took to reach Phillip, or conversely, the time his orders took to reach their recipients,? write Briggs and Burke. ?The delays of the Spanish government were notorious, leading one official to wish that Death would arrive from Spain? (p. 22). In today?s world of cell phones, texting and instant messaging, it seems unreal that someone would need to wait months to hear a response. I learned during undergraduate school that when President Reagan was shot in 1981, the London Times called the Washington Post for more information before the Post even knew about it. Although I cannot find a source to verify this, it is amazing to consider news could travel halfway around the world faster than it could go across town.