It seems a lucky thing that I returned to graduate school in the fall of 1995. A year or two earlier, the librarian at the secondary school where I was teaching did a demonstration of a new technology called “email.” It seemed an interesting tool even though I couldn’t think of an immediate use for it. I didn’t have anyone to email. I was still getting up on Saturday mornings and typing letters to friends.
Yes, I did say typing. I was not opposed to using computers. I used the school computers for quizzes, handouts, and the speech I made to graduating seniors the final year of my high-school teaching career. In fact, I wanted to own a computer, but I didn’t want to start using one for my longer-term writing projects until I could have a computer at home. I knew from experience that once I advanced in word-processing technology, I became dependent on the newer tool, a dependence I very much welcomed–the more advanced technology allows greater flexibility with and control over the printed page; with computers we can not only manipulate the page in ways we could not even dream of with our best electronic typewriters, we can even preview what the page will look like once it’s printed out. Luckily, the University of Iowa–where I went to become a student again–had a program that allowed students to purchase computers with affordable monthly payments. I was just in time for the digital revolution.
During my first weeks back in school, one of the professors stood before the new graduate students and announced that, because of the burgeoning computer technologies, within five years we would no longer be using printed books. It was a curious statement because not only did I know it was not true, I was quite sure that neither the person making the statement nor anyone else in the room believed it either. Nevertheless, the pronouncement called attention to what everyone surely felt, that something in our noetic economy–our way of organizing, storing, and retrieving knowledge, along with our way of conceiving of what knowledge is–was deeply changing. As Anthony Grafton puts it in his recent New Yorker (Nov. 5, 2007) article, “Future Reading” (which Tyler Meier refers to in his recent blog) “The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press….” Not only do we have greater flexibility with and control over the pages that we produce, we enjoy unprecedented flexibility with and access to texts–through Early English Books Online, the Google Library Project, JSTOR, etc.–that we read. We find ourselves at an especially complex and bracing moment of noetic history.
Grafton–whose article magisterially leads us on a quick journey through the history of writing, print, and digitization–characterizes some of the complexity of our present moment this way: “But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you.” I am reminded of what I have heard referred to as Ong’s law–after the great historian of cosciousness Walter Ong –that advanced language technologies do not eliminate but rather reinforce while they also transform the older technologies. Thus, for example, as print technology advanced, it became more urgent to acquire the skills of literacy, the technology of writing. As we moved into a period of radio technology, it became more important for literate persons to be able to produce a printed page, that is, to use a typewriter.
So even though we are well into a great digitial revolution–one that many of us welcome–it does not at all appear that books are disappearing. In fact, everywhere I go, libraries and bookstores seem to be acquiring more and more printed material. And yet this printed material is changing. One small example has to do with print-on-demand technology, which allows such an enterprise as Salt Publishing (which publishes contemporary poetry and criticism) to operate on a rather large scale with a small staff and relatively low overhead. This technology is also altering, if not eliminating, the concept of the print run. Because the press uses a service that prints books only when they are ordered, there are no print runs in the older sense, and presumably a book will never go out of print unless the print-on-demand service folds or the publisher decides to discontinue the book. Given this technological regime, a book could stay in print for hundreds if not thousands of years, and older books could be brought back into print–a service that Salt Publishing carries out also–for the same millennia.
It’s difficult to say what other ways digital technology will continue to alter book technology. Frankly, I look forward to the day when I can purchase and read more books in electronic form. Because of my allergies, I am unable to read for long stretches many of the printed books that I have owned for decades. And as much as I love my personal ilbrary of three or four thousand printed titles, all of these books cause a great deal of clutter in my work space. My preferred interior decorating style is what I would style early American monastic, but the sheer volume of books that I keep around, along with my own ineptitude with spatial organization, prevent me from achieving the kind of sparseness that I like. For the time being, though, the codex form provides its own flexibility and convenience–for transporting, marking, setting alongside other texts–that I simply do not have otherwise. It seems to me telling that even though I started reading Grafton’s article online, when I realized that it was several pages long, I walked into the next room to pick up the print version of The New Yorker to finish the article (of course, the very fact that I think of an online article as made up of “pages” registers the extent to which I am still a person of print). I find it difficult to imagine that print will disappear, just as I find it difficult to imagine life without computers and the Internet–even though I was living what I thought was fine without the latter a little over a decade ago. I suspect that I have changed and been altered by the emerging noetic economy in ways that I do not yet realize. I suspect that most all of us are changing with these emerging forces. It’s exciting, and at times a little precarious, to think where this revolution might be taking us.