HU520:
A Review of George Landow's "Twenty minutes into the future, or How
are we moving beyond the book?"
In G. Nunberg (Ed.) (1996). The Future of the Book (pp. 209-237),
Berkeley: U. of California Press .
What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?
We're beyond the book already: third in sales behind television, cinema,
& video games (ouch).
most young people don't sense the aesthetic stature or solidity of
the book (211), they get little remnants of the high book culture.
Tufte complains about resolution on line but Landow offers access and
constructability (interactivity) as compensations: multiple maps at reduced
resolution. "people are turning to nonbooklike objects for thier texual
information" (214).
the book as technology. "Technology, in the lexicon of
many humanists, generally means 'only that technology of which I am frightened'"
(215).
Printing = multiplicity and fixity => "In an age of printing,
the person who would preserve a text does so, in contrast, by disseminating
it as widely as possible" (versus manuscript and to a much higher
power of distribution in a digital culture.) In a digital culture do you
ensure preservation by reusing a "text" or reconstructing it
in a MM genre?
gets hyperbolic on p. 227. On WWW ignore the poorly conceived, egotistical,
and boring material and concentrate on the interesting material that's
appeared (been enabled or afforded--Norman) by the new writing system.
What will happen when children find themselves introducing the sound,
visual, and textual media into discussions? Will they increasingly loose
the ability to "formulate abstract or physical desriptions"?
then we are really going to be "beyond the book" (235).