Wk 7 | Book/Print
This post will be most appealing to Garvey enthusiasts, as it will most likely resemble a scrapbook of ideas and comments from this week's readings.
Some have argued that we are in the "incunabula" of a new epoch, a truly digital age, courtesy of the Internet and WWW. If we look at many of the same features Hobart describes for printing and apply them to online production, we can draw fairly obvious similarities: "securing a heritage of classical texts against the threat of loss or corruption" (think Google's ambitious project to digitize every book in existence for preservation and distribution); "secur[ing] advances in a wide range of fields, from anatomy to zoology, encouraging the development of modern science and medicine" (think the digitization of medical records, the democratization of technological discoveries through free online content, etc.); "enabling religious dissent to inspire a mass movement" (without the religious baggage, think of social networking's ability to move millions of people to rapid action and civic involvement). Check, check, and Hobartian check--the Internet looks like an epoch-making invention to me.
Briggs and Burke echo this new epoch, focusing on the challenges of what Lanham would call "the attention economy." Because of the new and unpredictable proliferation of information, "[t]here was a need for new methods of information management, just as there is in the early days of the Internet" (p. 15). These authors then catalogue, in excruciating, anecdotal ways, the development and impact of print culture on orality, and how the two co-existed up to, during, and after the 300 years or so in which the "print revolution" took place. For my own purposes, it is interesting to read about the communication networks of the early modern world, as it gives me a sharper appreciation for the history of new media studies and their impact on the layperson; I can only project guesses for the future of new media studies, but I suspect that scholars will trace the Internetification of the developing world and draw parallels to the distribution of the printed word among early modern communication networks. Did I just give someone a dissertation proposal?
Hobart's account of Montaigne's struggle to separate the memories of his dead friend that came with the books he gave him (Hobart p. 88) lead me to think that two narratives exist within books -- the story being told within the pages, and the story of the pages themselves: how they came to be in your possession and how they sparked your attention. That second level of narrative does not exist with .pdfs of books or chapters I read on my laptop, nor can I look on the inside cover of e-books on my Kindle to see how many previous readers have engaged THIS specific version of THIS specific text. Physical books--especially used and borrowed ones--have a sentimentalist history embedded in them, and the loss of this sensory feeling is what I believe bibliophiles--like Manguel --are reacting to when they cry out in fear against the supposed disappearance of the printed word in the 21st century. "Those who see computer development as the devil incarnate...allow nostalgia to hold sway over experience" (p. 137).
And if books "declare themselves" through characteristics like size, jacket illustration and physical shape (Manguel, 1996, p. 125), what "declarations" can an e-book on my Kindle possibly make? Does the Kindle (and other e-readers, obviously) significantly pervert the classic characteristics of print culture that Briggs and Burke lay out for the early modern period, or does it simply update them for the supermodern era? Culture-fracturing or not, one advantage is clear: the Kindle solves my storage problem, the same storage problem alluded to in Hobart, Briggs and Burke, and Manguel. If I commit fully to my Kindle, no longer will I have to buy maple laminate bookshelves from Target and assemble them with shabby dowels and sketchy screws. The problem I face, however, is one of enthusiastic adoption, not unlike the resistant new modern readers who preferred the scribe's work over the mass-produced Gutenbergian book. And until the Kindle can demonstrate the same kind of success at the Penguin, as Manguel discusses, I'm pretty confident e-readers will not upset the print culture of the book.
Shifting gears without a clutch, Garvey's piece instantly called to mind an article I read a few weeks back that discussed how digital scrapbooking has taken off as a closet industry and niche hobby online, which more importantly has brought legions of previously recalcitrantly Luddite mothers into the digital age. Sites like digitalscrapbookplace.com or heritagescrapbooks.com connect circles of print-based women in a previously arcane and useless environment (at least to them). Hooray for democratized access that lets middle-aged women sift through piles of unopened attachments in e-mails containing pictures of grandchildren!
Shifting once more: really, aren't social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon just another form of scrapbooking, perhaps remediated scrapbooking (scrapbookmarking, even?) ? Garvey points to "Netscape Bookmarks or Microsoft Favorites" as ways for users to organize their materials, but Garvey wrote before the social distribution of bookmarking became as popular as it is today. Users can now parse elements of news stories, images, movie and sound files, or simple URLs together and recirculate their assemblages to other users in similar or completely different demographics. Not to assign too much agency to Google in this post, but Google Notebook, the Firefox add-on, functions precisely as a Web-based scrapbook to document and capture value online, creating an "idiosyncratic catalog, a reflection of personal identity made from mass-produced and distributed publication" (Garvey, 2003, p. 209). I appreciate the corollaries Garvey draws between Web sites and scrapbooks, but I appreciate more the positive portrayal of small-town newspaper editors engaging in the process of exchange (p. 213); my father, and his before him, helmed our own small town's newspaper, The Bee & Herald, in Jefferson, IA, pop. 4,400. I worked at that paper in various capacities (stuffer, page editor, ad sales and design, copy editor, writer, building painter) since I was 6 years old, and I recognized Garvey's description of 19th and early 20th century editorial exchanges in the day-to-day operations of our own humble paper. In small-town America (no, not Sarah Palin's vision of it) editorial attribution is far less important than the dissemination of interesting and useful information to your local citizens. Striking how different out notions of attribution can be in academic publication, and how those can even differ in new media works online, where content is mixed and remixed ad nauseum.
Alternate titles for this blog post:
- Why early modern readers didn't need programs like RIF (but why they would've appreciated the pizza parties anyway)
- Hey, here's a history of the book! Let's look at every example possible.
- Commonplace books: The Cliff's Notes of the 17th century.
- Montaigne's Biblioguide to the Withdrawn Emo Reader
- Garvey's continued insistence to belabor the "scrapbooking as baking bread" analogy does nothing for me except to stimulate my hunger to eat the pages of my bookshelves. Please. Stop.