Week Seven: Books and Print
Orality and Memory:
Although we may very well be re-adopting behaviors characteristic of an oral culture, our American orality is expressed with brevity compared to earlier eras. As Briggs and Burke point out, ?the enthusiasm of some members of the public for sermons which lasted two or three hours would be difficult to believe today were it not attested in the diaries of the times? (24). In other words, the assumption is that today?s average Joe/Betty wants information short and sweet, cut and dry, clean and easy, fast and friendly. These stupid sayings are testaments to a mentality. However, I consciously used the phrase ?American orality? in my opening sentence, because it is worth noting that this desire for speed is probably a Eurocentric/USA-centric position, since many other countries do still enjoy long sermons and long oral performances.
Even so, it is probably fair to draw connections between the technologically advanced countries and the individual?s desire for brevity. Internet technology is built on speed, so it encourages speed; people in technologically advanced nations are moving from material processing to production with more speed. A side note that is somewhat related: It?s funny to think that the large libraries of Europe had trouble holding all of the new books being printed and struggled over categorizing them; today, we navigate the largest library in the world (the internet) and move through thousands of texts with ease; however, I?d be willing to bet that our memory banks hold only fragments compared to the long passages held in memory banks of the past. These are the trade-offs for speed.
Regarding memory: I had a problem with the fact that Hobart and Schiffmann do not consider that people?s memories today, like the memories of people in the past, continue to use visual and spatial dimensions as triggers. Hobart and Schiffmann assert that the visual and spatial memory is ?an art now long lost, the ancients built up memory visually and spatially, place by place, layer by layer, creating a flexible mnemonic network that enabled them to retain the contents of a papyrus roll without having to consult the actual text? (97). However, I often find myself thinking about the location of a passage on the page (bottom left or top right), and this spatial/visual trigger helps me to recall the passage. Additionally, do we not access our spatial dimension, emotional center, and sensory perceptions in order to trigger memories today in the exact same way? In fact, I think the visual aspect of the internet?the visual and spatial variants of web pages?serve the same purpose and help us to retain important memories. So the internet can act as the new visual and spatial trigger for memory.
Standardized Knowledge, Fragmented Knowledge, and the Advancement of Knowledge:
According to Briggs and Burke, Elizabeth Eisenstein was one of the first people to insist that ?print standardized knowledge which had been much more fluid in the age of oral or manuscript circulation? and that ?the critique of authority was encouraged by print? (18). Briggs and Burke proceed to point out the two major critiques of Eisenstein?s evaluation: 1) the move toward a standardization of knowledge took place over a long period of time and 2) print might not have been the only cause of any changes seen in later societies. And I would like to note that the opposite critiques are true for the internet?
1) Changes have taken place over a short period of time. 2) The internet can be pinned down as the primary causal factor for many changes in our communicative patterns precisely because the changes have taken place in such a short period of time. Accordingly, the internet, in my view, has an opposite effect from that pointed out by Eisenstein; i.e., the internet does not standardize knowledge. It fragments knowledge, often disseminates false statements, and presents fact-less (just plain stupid) ideas as equal to more evidential forms of knowledge. Both types of information exist in the internet?s non-hierarchical system wherein both types are given equal access and, arguably, equal status. However, I do think that the internet allows for a greater critique of authority, especially as websites like youtube and jibjab gain popularity. So on that count, Eisenstein perhaps located a persistent and prevalent characteristic of mass-produced communications.
Despite rapid changes as a result of technology, it seems that the high-minded were always the slowest to accept new communication technologies and always preferred a hierarchy of information, with special elite status going to certain types of publications. Briggs and Burke point out that ?men of high status (and women even more so) were often unhappy with the idea of publishing books?and so make the authors look like tradespeople? (37). I wonder: To what extent is the university today acting like these ?men of status? as tenure boards refuse online publications? From Brigg?s and Burke?s perspective, they might be fools to reject such publications. However, if we consider Hobart and Schiffman?s observation that the advent of print allowed ?Europeans to secure their heritage of classical texts against the threat of loss or corruption,? (89) then perhaps contemporary academics who avoid publishing on the internet do so because of a fear of the cut-and-paste, where originality is lost in the immense web of the cyberworld and origins are hard to track down. As Ellen GRUBER Garvey (awesome name) states in her article, ?Depending on how well the reader notes the sources, the trail of crumbs left behind may leave the reader stranded without a way back, like Hansel and Grettle after dropping their bread crumbs in the woods? (210). If the advancement of knowledge at all requires a history of previous ideas, then the academic philosopher might be wise to demand a history-tracking device online or an archivization of online space. One?s ideas often require an inter-textual knowledge that can only come through exposure to a landscape of previous ideas, and such a landscape is invisible when past publications are wiped out. I do think, however, that problems with online publishing can be solved (and many have been solved).
Interestingly, as GRUBER Garvey points out, being unable to track down a book that a person had previously read is ?symptomatic of a more general problem of an accelerated pace of life? (211). However, even if the speed of life is to blame today for lost links and disappearing web resources, speed would not be a problem if the pace of archiving could keep up. But strangely, GRUBER Garvey seems to believe that web archiving will NOT keep up with the pace of life because of ?American attitudes about the boundaries between reading and authoring and about the ways in which all media, old or new, are experienced as renewable resources? (212).
I think if we look to GRUBER Garvey and Manguel, we can see that part of this attitude about media as ?renewable resources? has historical origins in both newspapers and books. As GRUBER Garvey points out in ?Scissoring and Scrapbooks,? newspapers were cheap and disposable. They wasted away, and although the knowledge within them would seem to require storage, the material artifact itself seemed to require the trash heap. Similarly, Manguel points out, in ?The Shape of the Book,? that the book shrank to fit into the size of one?s hands. In this way, the book became personal property. A person could trade books, sell books, or lose books. Additionally, the selling and mass reproduction of popular books caused a devaluation of the material object, since it could be found elsewhere and re-read. Similarly, I suppose the advent of the VCR removed the need to think of TV shows as forever unrenewable; and today, the double and triple-posting of content across media formats (TV to web to Ipod to Phone) allows us to continue to view media as renewable resources.
However, when saying that media objects are understood as renewable resources, GRUBER Garvey assumes that all media is treated as a throw-away object and therefore not valued. Here, she fails to make an important distinction between everyday and academic content within media. In short, from my experience, websites that are considered to be of ?the everyday? (the silly, the banal, the pop) do disappear at very fast rates and are treated as unimportant resources. But the ?academic? websites, generally, linger for years. In fact, just yesterday, I visited an academic website with a patterned background reminiscent of 1997 web design, and Matt looked over my shoulder, and surprised, he says, ?What the heck is that? Nice background! Ha!? But the point is: the site was still there, holding its ground?probably because the contents of the site were useful and required permanence. In short, American attitudes toward media objects/information are more sophisticated than GRUBER Garvey admits.
Regarding the advancement of academic knowledge: Interestingly, Hobart and Schiffmann suggest that early print publications were ?exposing the medieval worldview to a much more thorough and critical analysis? (89). However, I wonder to what extent Hobart and Schiffmman are uncritically suggesting that the invention of the printing press was the cause of a perceived increase in critical thinking. To frame my contention in terms of new media: I?m not convinced that the internet has increased the amount of scholarly work being produced; the internet has only increased availability to the scholarly work being produced. Therefore, if the thinkers who were doing the critical thinking in days past are the same thinkers doing the critical thinking today, then the same amount of thinkers are probably thinking, and this holds probably true in other times as well. In other words, if scholars had read scrolls written by scholars in their fields prior to the advent of print, then the advent of print did not necessarily open up critical analysis, since these same scholars were still selecting certain readings and only reading certain authors. I would argue that the "common people" (as opposed to scholars) were not reading the critical material, but the popular material; so critical thinking did not suddenly balloon, nor did it ever suddenly ballooned, although it might be worth arguing that it slowly expanded over time as more countries required education. Granted, scholars certainly had more works available to them, but one could argue that this only dumbed-down the critical analysis of any singular field as reading became more broad and poor ideas intermingled with good ideas. The actual situation is hard to assess, honestly, so I am skeptical of Hobart and Schiffmann?s confidence.