Let’s pretend to make fun of John Updike
My column last week pretended to be about why John Updike’s rant against digital books in the New York Times Book Review was absurd. But it was secretly a column about why bloggers who compare the Internet to the printing press are just plain wrong.
I understand why people make the comparison — both the printing press and the Internet have led to an explosion in new kinds of narrative, and new authors have gotten the means to distribute their work to the masses. But that’s where the similarties end. The printing press, by making books common, turned reading into a private occupation — something that people did in their homes with books in their personal collections. What the printing press did was usher in an era of privately-owned books. But the Internet promises to make books and reading public again. When Google Print and the Internet Archive’s Open Library project make books into something that we can share, that we can own collectively, a radical transformation has taken place. Reading has become a public activity.
That’s what I’m saying, people.
July 14th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
I enjoyed this column, Annalee, but must contest a point you make about how “the Internet promises to make books and reading public again,” and that before the Internet, reading and book culture was primarily a private activity. While true that we read books privately, book culture has been a public activity since the Enlightenment. Jurgen Habermas bases his argument in “The Structural Transformation of the public Sphere” on this premise: the circulation of 17th c British magazines and the novel CREATED a public sphere as we knew it throughout 20th c. - Public opinion and representations of a psychological self (although bourgeois self) were circulated through magazines and novels, provoking discussions in coffee houses, salons, and newly-constructed public libraries. Perhaps this is a prototype for the transformation that is in store for us via the Internet, but I doubt that the radical transformation that is about to take place is that for the first time, “reading has become a public activity.” It has been for the past 400 years - but maybe now not just for Euro and American bourgeois - the transformation may be in accessibility, assuming that technology is widely available to all (and that’s still a large assumption).
July 17th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I agree that reading has always had public components, and that it has led to a public sphere of debate (coffeehouses, newspaper opinion pages, etc.). I also don’t believe that the Internet is creating such a dramatic transformation in reading culture that it’s some kind singularity.
That said, I *do* think that we’re seeing a shift in how books are literally distributed, consumed and read. The ideal “universal library,” which will allow multiple people to read the same book — or pull samples from the same book to be recontextualized elsewhere — is an historically novel way of experiencing books. The public sphere Habermas described was full of static texts that existed in limited quantities. You could talk about books publicly, but not read and own them collectively. When we have collective ownership of what we read, I think reading goes from being something private that’s discussed publicly to something public that’s discussed in all kinds of weird new places. Maybe these discussions will become more private as they’re relocated to personal blogs and micro-communities.