The Future of the Book, (Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg), Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press

Introduction

Not much useful here, though I complain a bit on page 9.

Books in Time, Carla Hesse

 Avoiding technological determinism. She likes Chartier's mode of cultural production or the "civilization of the book" (21). The media is NOT the mode, just a big part of it (22). Instead of answering the question of whether modern technologies are killing the book, (which she thinks is a pointless question) she talks about this technological change as a "crystallizing" force. That's another way of making my point about the media adding layers of literacy practices over what she calls the modern literary system. It's another way of saying that media has "made obvious" trends and practices that we've acknowledged at some level but find compelling at this moment in time. It's yet another way of illustrating how new media have the potential of "making obvious" every component of a literary system that we had once taken for granted. Norman would use the word "affordances." The debate about most aspect of the literary system was afforded, made possible, by print.

(23) "Let information be free" is not a new inclination. Condorcet argued the same issues in the late 1700s. Deregulation of print ended up encouraging the pouring forth of incendiary and often seditious, libelous, and obscene works. Sounds familiar. ("Don't give them the forum to speak if you don't want to hear what they have to say." My suggestion to teachers who just want their students to chat on synchronous systems.)

Some problems with her claim at the top of 25.

Competing deals of the civilization of the book: 1) right-bearing and accountable individual author; 2) value of democratic access to useful knowledge; 3) faith in fee market competition (27). In the 1790s they thought that temporality was the most dangerous aspect of print (quick, incendiary, unaccountable publications. Books were safer, slower modes of cultural production.

She sets up binaries that peg her position: cultural agents can either be 1) sustained self-constituting and accountable citizens OR 2) continuously and spontaneously recomposing postmodernist subjectivities, inhabiting an increasingly imaginable, technocratically managed empire? (28)

Dangerous modes of communication via the microchip (29).

What's really new?

• Recasting knowledge forms in temporal rather than spatial terms => my synchronicity.

I'd say--English studies professionals are central players in acclamating the citizenry to our constructed new literary system. Through our influence on how this acclimation occurs can have a profound influence on its formation.

• Knowledge is modes of thought, apprehension, and expression, as techniques and practices (31).
• synchronicity quote on page 32. a new mode of temporality for public communication, . . . a continuously immediate present. We can expect a "terrain that reconceives our mental landscape in performative rather than structural terms" (32).

Seems like a lament. She seems to want it both ways (see notes on p. 33)

The Pragmatics of the New, James J. O'Donnell

(46) There is a direct reference to the Monastic/University connection I keep wanting to make. Also "print was a business that flourished in less salubrious parts of town (read academia), among grubby businessmen unafraid of dirty hands" (46). Just as technological explorations occur in the labs of the U. Not a high faluting place in the Humanities disciplines.

Cassiodorus was a pragmatist not a prophet like McLuhan. He clung to his ideal of a monastic life organized around holy writing and hammered away at it. He used the new wholeheartedly and found new ways of adapting old institutions. "Most of all, he did things" (51).

Drop the pragmatics of the old or the theoretics of the new. Adopt the pragmatics of the new and go to work. Theory rising out of practice. Librarians are our leading pragmatists.

Great entrepreneurial statement on the top of 53.

Find a wonderfully strange reading of our modern literary system (Hesse) on pg. 54. "The genuine spirit of our culture . . . is in pitching in joyously to its ongoing reconstruction.

Material Matters, by the annoying Paul Duguid

My job is to try to understand even an annoying writer like Duguid who set's up one after another of fairly unnecessary and distracting binaries and see what use I can make of his ideas and even his language

We underestimate the "social-material complex" (Raymond Williams) of print/books/writing and its deep social resourcefulness.

Critical theory is the culprit because it relies on simplifying tropes like supersession and liberation. He set up binaries suggesting that many critical theorists take one side of either equation. NOT

I argue with his statement that "the book notably did not 'kill' architecture" on p. 66.

Lots of authors who can now be ignored on pp. 68-69. He's threatened because he thinks that the past can be "reduced to ashes" via theory or ideology.

Top of page 71 has a great quote on the "predatory supersession of both hardware and software" that I could use up against either Hesse's or O'Donnell's examples of sychronicity to illustrate some of the range of possibilities.

Again I take issue with "all technological change is progress toward the removal of privilege" (73). Who is he talking about here? No academics that I know of.

On pp. 78 he asks us to "consider information and technology as mutually constitutive and ultimately indissoluble;" I would add to that human practices. All three are mutually constitutive and interdependent.

His list of the social system around books seems as usual short and one-sided. My list on pg. 79. At any rate we need to "look at communication technologies in the round" (80) as material objects embedded in social systems.

News (information and ultimately wisdom?) is shaped. Data stored without shape is of little use and no social status (duh'piphany). Connect with O'Donnell pg. 53. I wonder if he's concerned about the number of untrained people who are responsible for the warrants of the news we now can form via the WWW or something: fearful of an expanded publishing public.

Differing to older news forms may save the book at some level but it is the cumulative layering that systems like Lexis-Nexus give us on established forms of production that seem different, now. Put aside the dated notion that a media will live or die and focus on describing, using, and theorizing the intensive layering that is now possible with digital systems.

He borrows the term 'demassification' from Toffler. I wonder about it on 83.

Good lab quote on p. 84. "It's hard to share and coordinate practice if you don't share the same physical space."