“Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.”
Heather Brooke thus quotes. But there are some clear differences between these two forms of mass media – which I will try to point out here.
Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century invention is widely regarded as “the machine that made us”, the greatest invention since we invented fire. And quite rightly so. The printing press made the world open to new information. While the ability to print was still a luxury, the print itself was made accessible to almost everybody at a cheap price.
C.H. Stevens, in his book, says that while the printing press enabled an efficient and effective one-to-many communication, the modern-day Internet (‘computer-networking’, back in those days) is more subtle as it enables a many-to-many communication. We can see this easily in the context of social media. Everyone is provided with the ease of publishing to everyone else. It is more liberating, in a sense. Larry Diamond argues that new digital tools (called “Liberation Technology”) empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” However, Cass Sunstein criticized the new technologies as creating “echo chambers” in which users would effectively surround themselves with others who are politically like-minded. This increased use of communication with anybody in the world might just lead to much less communication across the most salient social and political divides. For more insight into its effect on politics, refer Yaschua Mounk’s 2018 book – The people vs. democracy.
Clay Shirky goes on to say that “publishing is the new literacy”. He says – “Because it used to be incredibly difficult, complicated, and expensive to simply put material into the public sphere, and now it’s not. So I’m comparing it to literacy — literacy used to be reserved for a specialist class prior to the printing press, and, much more importantly, prior to the spread of publishers and the rise of the real publishing industry.” Moreover, with the advent of the newer technology, one thing is clear – anybody is a writer but as Shirky said, “we would see fewer authors and more writers. There’s this long, long, lonely gap between the 8,000-word New Yorker article and the 80,000-word book.” This gap is lost and taken over by the short-hand mindset of the modern age – the emphasis on the information and information alone of the transferred message. This intimacy and necessity on reductionism and efficiency of the communication have made it virtually impossible for the netizens to be able to have the patience of reading a long sentence (such as this sentence itself), let alone compose an 80,000-word book. Add to this impatience, an opinionated culture with hardly any privacy and needless judgements raining all over you (and your work). Further add the loss of the pen as the primary tool to write and losing the sense of an extensive touch to your writing (and don’t mention the smell of the ink itself), we are losing the whole aesthetic experience of writing and might find it even more difficult to write creatively despite the apparent liberalisation.
Project Gutenberg, founded back in 1971, is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. As of 20 May 2020, it had reached 62,108 items in its collection of free e-books. That’s not a large number but note that there are other digital libraries (and most of them are pirated) out there based on the same idea. One can find almost any possible book in these digital libraries. New writers are in fact switching to e-books (and audiobooks) over the traditional paper-books. Clay Shirky says that digitizing a book is different from normal publishing “because it puts it into an ecosystem where more people have access to more books. The digitizing of a book adds to searchability, it adds to portability.” He goes on to explain “searchability” as – “Search is essentially the current model of information-finding, where the old model was you go to the library and they tell you that you have to know what database you’re looking in before you look. That’s fine when there are 500 databases, maybe, and someone can help me decide. But when there’s an unlimited number of data sources, search becomes the intellectual model of the age.” Moreover, he says – “the other thing it does, though — which is good or bad, depending on your taste — is it encourages the ability to skip ahead to the parts they want to read.”
A digital book (especially non-fiction) is easier to make notes in so that one can later check them. It provides operations like “find”, “highlight”, “comment”, etc. which helps in summarizing the whole book as a matter of pointers to return back to (again non-fiction in particular). This is not restricted to the fiction of course since these two broad categories often intersect and the difference is quite blurred and the effect of digitization on a reader may just be very similar. In addition, it provides a customizable font option (both size and style). These are some of the constraints that we had to deal with while reading a physical book. Seeing it from a utility perspective, this development is healthy as the information is transferred even more efficiently. But phenomenally, digitization has abstracted the whole experience of reading a book. Sure, the earliest book was never supposed to be about the experience (only about enabling effective communication) but over the years, we have come to relate “reading” with the touch and smell of the paper. The digital age has focused merely on the information and hence on triggering exclusively the sense of vision. Even from a memory perspective, as noted above, we now have various tools provided to us to summarize a book in the head for us and “ease” our experience. But what if the fun of reading a book is to be dependent on putting these memory constraints and dealing with them by pushing ourselves to our limits?
Clay Shirky notes that the book-business is so old that we don’t know what its alternative is. Nobody lives now who has seen a world (prior to the 15th century) without the modern commercial books, and thus we have hesitated on e-books. But now things are changing, as he says. I personally believe that the naturality of physical books might also be based on a much deeper phenomenal experience that we can feel while reading them. This question should not be abstracted and ignored as we enter the (post-) information age. If we don’t consider these “vague” demands, I do believe that the activity of reading would fast become a dull informative activity rather than an aesthetic (i.e., disinterested interest, as Kant says) past-time activity – one which is fast getting subsumed by the entertainment industry. In fact, it is already becoming reflected upon the reader of this rather small essay.
-Kartik Sharma
References
https://www.salon.com/2010/07/09/clay_shirky/
Stevens, C. H. (1981). Many-to many communication.
https://bookriot.com/difference-between-fiction-and-nonfiction/
Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy: Why our freedom is in danger and how to save it. Harvard University Press.
Shaviro, S. (2016). Discognition. Watkins Media Limited.
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