Joachim Vlieghe

" I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. " JDS

book use: The Future of the Book is the Future of Society

bookuse:

The Future of the Book is the Future of Society

The Future of the Book is the Future of Society 03.18.2013, 9:31 AM

“I’m in Milan for the ifbookthen conference. Corriere della Serra (the leading Italian newspaper) asked me for an opinion piece they could publish in La Lettura, their weekly magazine, on the occasion of the meeting. This is what I gave them.” ~ Bob Stein

The Future of the Book

As someone who made the leap from print to electronic publishing over thirty years ago people often ask me to expound on the “future of the book.” Frankly, I can’t stand the question, especially when asked simplistically. For starters it needs more specificity. Are we talking 2 years, 10 years or 100 years? And what does the questioner mean by “book” anyway? Are they asking about the evolution of the physical object or its role in the social fabric?

It’s a long story but over the past thirty years my definition of “book” has undergone a major shift. At the beginning I simply defined a book in terms of its physical nature — paper pages infused with ink, bound into what we know as the codex. But then in the late 1970s with the advent of new media technologies we began to see the possibility of extending the notion of the page to include audio and video, imagining books with audio and video components. To make this work conceptually, we started defining books not in terms of their physical components but how they are used. From this perspective a book isn’t ink on bound paper, but rather “a user-driven medium” where the reader is in complete control of how they access the contents. With laser videodiscs and then cd-roms users/readers started “reading” motion pictures; transforming the traditionally producer-driven experience where the user simply sat in a chair with no control of pace or sequence into a fully user-driven medium.

This definition worked up through the era of the laser videodisc and the cd-rom, but completely fell apart with the rise of the internet. Without an “object” to tie it to, I started to talk about a book as the vehicle humans use to move ideas around time and space.

People often expressed opposition to my freewheeling license with definitions but I learned to push back, explaining that it may take decades, maybe even a century for stable new modes of expression and the words to describe them to emerge. For now I argued, it’s better to continuously redefine the definition of “book” until something else clearly takes its place.

A Book is a Place

In 2005 when the U.S. based Macarthur Foundation gave me a huge grant to explore how publishing might evolve as it moves from the printed page to the networked screen I used the money to found what I playfully named The Institute for the Future of the Book. With a group of young people, just out of university and coming of age in the era of the social web, we carried out a number of experiments under the rubric of “networked books.”

This was the moment of the blog and we wondered what would happen if we applied the concept of “reader comments” to essays and books. Our first attempt, McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, turned out to be a remarkably lucky choice. The book’s structure — numbered paragraphs rather than numbered pages — required my colleagues to come up with an innovative design allowing readers to make comments at the level of the paragraph rather than the page. Their solution to what at the time seemed like a simple graphical UI problem, was to put the comments to the right of each of Wark’s paragraphs rather than follow the standard practice of placing them underneath the author’s text.

Within a few hours of putting Gamer Theory online, a vibrant discussion emerged in the margins. We realized that moving comments from the bottom to the side, a change that at the time seemed minor, in fact had profound implications. Largely because Wark took a very active role in the unfolding discussion, our understanding at first focused on the ways in which this new format upends the traditional hierarchies of print which place the author on a pedestal and the reader at her adoring feet. With the side-by-side layout of Gamer Theory’s text and comments, author and reader were suddenly occupying the same visual space; which in turn shifted their relationship to one of much greater equality. As the days went by it became clear that author and reader were engaged in a collaborative effort to increase their collective understanding.

We started to talk about “a book as a place” where people congregate to hash out their thoughts and ideas.

Later experiments in classrooms and reading groups were just as successful eventhough no author was involved, leading us to realize we were witnessing much more than a shift in the relationship between author and reader.

The reification of ideas into printed, persistent objects obscures the social aspect of both reading and writing, so much so, that our culture portrays them as among the most solitary of behaviors. This is because the social aspect traditionally takes place outside the pages — around the water cooler, at the dinner table and on the pages of other publications in the form of reviews or references and bibliographies. In that light, moving texts from page to screen doesn’t make them social so much as it allows the social components to come forward and to multiply in value.

And once you’ve engaged in a social reading experience the value is obvious. Contemporary problems are sufficiently complex that individuals can rarely understand them on their own. More eyes, more minds collaborating on the task of understanding will yield better, more comprehensive answers.

Our grandchildren will assume that reading with others, i.e. social reading, is the “natural” way to read. They will be amazed to realize that in our day reading was something one did alone. Reading by one’s self will seem as antiquated as silent movies are to us.

The difficult thing however about predicting the future of reading is that everything i’ve said so far presumes that what is being read is an “n-page” article or essay or an “n-page,” “n-chapter” book,” when realistically, the forms of expression will change dramatically as we learn to exploit the unique affordances of new electronic media. Ideally, the boundaries between reading and writing will become ever more porous as readers take a more active role in the production of knowledge and ideas.

Clemens Setz, the author of the literary novel Indigo watched the conversation unfold as 40 students in a class at Hildesheim University outside Berlin carried out an extensive conversation with over 1800 comments. At a recent symposium Setz said that knowing his readers would be playing an active role in the margin will effect how he writes; he’ll make room for their participation.

Follow the Gamers

And lest, you think this shift applies only to non-fiction, please consider huge multi-player games such as World of Warcraft as a strand of future-fiction where the author describes a world and the players/readers write the narrative as they play the game.

Although we date the “age of print” from 1454, more than two hundred years passed before the “novel” emerged as a recognizable form. Newspapers and magazines took even longer to arrive on the scene. Just as Gutenberg and his fellow printers started by reproducing illustrated manuscripts, contemporary publishers have been moving their printed texts to electronic screens. This shift will bring valuable benefits (searchable text, personal portable libraries, access via internet download, etc.), but this phase in the history of publishing will be transitional. Over time new media technologies will give rise to new forms of expression yet to be invented that will come to dominate the media landscape in decades and centuries to come.

My instinct is that game makers, who, unlike publishers, have no legacy product to hold them back will be at the forefront of this transformation. Multimedia is already their language, and game-makers are making brilliant advances in the building of thriving, million-player communities. As conventional publishers prayerfully port their print to tablets, game-makers will embrace the immense promise of networked devices and both invent and define the dominant modes of expression for centuries to come.

The Future of the Book is the Future of Society

“The medium, or process, of our time — electric technology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.
It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to “the others. And they’re changing dramatically.” Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message

Following McLuhan and his mentor Harold Innis, a persuasive case can be made that print played the key role in the rise of the nation state and capitalism, and also in the development of our notions of privacy and the primary focus on the individual over the collective. Social reading experiments and massive multi-player games are baby steps in the shift to a networked culture. Over the course of the next two or three centuries new modes of communication will usher in new ways of organizing society, completely changing our understanding of what it means to be human.

I’ve been so kind as to type out and add a transcript to this quite lengthy interview with McKenzie Wark about the life, persona and ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Look at the video or quickly browse through the text. You’ll see that there are several things in there that relate to a lot of things that I have add to my blog.

McKenzie Wark, good morning! Welcome to Radio National Breakfast.

- Good Morning.

One of Marshall McLuhan’s most famous sayings ‘the medium is the message’. What did he mean by that?

- What he was trying to do is to get you not to pay attention the to content, but the form of media. But before you even start to talk about what someone says or what’s in a program, or
anything like that, to think about how something like radio or television has effects just as a form in its own.

Why did he think that was important?

- He thought that particular media had particular ways of shaping our awareness and our ability to know the world. So he thought that (..) print media shaped a certain kind of sensibility and awareness, a certain kind of understanding of how the world could be put together and how it worked. And he thought that there had been a shift from print to what he called electric media. So he is sort of a the cusp  of the (..) not the beginning of broadcasting but of the generalization of broadcasting. And he thought that really that was not only going to change consciousness, but our ability to understand and interact with the world.

So it’s the sixties, TV enormously popular. It had been vetted down and had exploded in terms of its (..) widespread use. Newspapers where still there, as they had been for more than a century. A dominant purveyor of information, but as you put it - as he put it - a sort of turning point is. Is that they era he lived in?

- Well, he went to Cambridge in the nineteen thirties. You know, he was born in nineteen eleven, so it’s the centenary of his birth. He dies in ninetheen eigthy, no longer with us. So he’s not really a sixties guy. By the time the sixties happened he’d already published several books. He was established as a professor of English. But that’s when there’s if you like the McLuhan Boom. Is about (..) ninetheen sixty-seven, sixty-eight. And he sort of intersects with a certain self-awareness about media and he was someone who, you  know, who wasn’t a, you know,  sort of twenty year old hippy, but seemed to be speaking about the world that that moment addressed.

And what was his theory about media, about mass communication?

- Well, of course it’s in the famous phrase (..) the medium is the message, which he later turned to media is the massage. And both of those sense of it have particular resonances. So the first thing is to pay attention to form: how does the actual form of a media work and what does it do to you? That’s medium is the message. Medium is the massage, this little pun on it, is to do with (..) for him everything is tactile, that he really wants to understand the relationship with the body to media before you start to sort of intellectualise it and think about content and all that stuff.

Well, he spoke exactly on that topic in a (..) play that disembodiment of television, in one sense it’s incredibly  precient, ahead of his time, and on another level you could almost unkindly say he’s a little bit unhinged. But that’s what he would have to say whilst he was being broadcasted live on television.

**McLuhan, 1977**
By the way, at this moment, right, we are on the air and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re in a dis-kind of being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their private identity. (…) Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being masked man. By the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia. And so revivals on all hands, in every phase of live today. Revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are, or were.
**

Or were. We all know about revival and nostalgia, but not all of us would ascribed it back to mass media or mass communications. What’s the link he’s referring to then?

- Well, the first thing about McLuhan is: he wants to talk about media as environment. And for him environment means the part of what’s around you that you can’t actually see, that you sort
of forget is there. So he’s saying that media is environment and you forget you’re interacting with that environment until it kind of hits you in the head. So that’s kind of the first bit.

What do you mean? We don’t know we’re watching television, or.. ?

- I think most of the time ‘NO, we don’t know what television is when we’re watching it’. So, we know we’re watching a show called such-and-such and it’s funny or it’s a drama or whatever.
But what does it mean to be watching television? What does it mean to be listening to the radio? What does it mean to be having a cellphone converstation while walking down the street
and you’re talking to somebody else who’s waling in a different street who’s also on a cellphone? We’ve kind of forgotten that that’s an environment and he’s saying there that one of the things about that is the disembodiment. Your voice is elsewhere. You’re talking to an elsewhere. And if it’s a cellphone, elsewhere is talking back to you. So there’s, if you like, a completely separate environment with voices and minds interacting that’s completely different  to where those bodies are, as bodies could be somewhere else, you know, completely unrelated to that. So how do we dwell in those two spheres at once? And he then wants to say there’s a disconnect there, it makes it hard to have a consistent and coherent identity. You know, I was at a baseball game once and I was sitting behind this guy who took a cellphone call and was obviously flat out lying to his boss about where he was. And the voice had obviously said something like isn’t there a ball game going on. He said it was on television. He claimed to be  watching it on TV while he was working or something. This is what I could understand. Also firstly it’s weird that I can overhear this conversation. Secondly, isn’t it kind of weird that someone’s making up this story. There’s someone (..) he’s someone else, he’s someone else as the disembodied voice to who he is as the embodied person sitting there with a giant beer and a hotdog watching the yankees game. 

One disembodied voice, talking about another disembodied experience with another third party - disembodied, listening in.

- Right. And that’s a fairly (..) We might not have done that, but we might have done things like it, you know. And we forget to sort of stop and think about what are of these environments  we’ve entered. And then the last link is that (..) he thinks there’s something unsettling about that and maybe it’s why we go looking for (..) the ghosts of identities, of past identities. Of trying to sort of hang on to something that would make sense of this.

And this is what he says about identity in the digital world. Remember, this is nineteen sixty-eight, decades before computers became widespread. In a way he’s almost forecasting Facebook. Let’s have a listen.

**McLuhan, 1968**
In the new electric world, where everybody is involved in everybody, where everbody is involved in complex processes that are going on in the total environment, the old identity cards that used to constitute private identity, the old means of finding out ‘who am I?’, right (..) will not work. People (..) now have to encounter themselves in the inner world (..) Kierkengard or the existential style, in order to know who they are. The old methods of merely external (..) identity by marks of occupation, national origine, age grouping and so on, these will not serve any longer as means of distinguishing private identity.
**

Precient on one level, although national identity is still a big part of our lives.

- The thing about McLuhan is that he’s really an orator. He’s in a sense a modern artist whose medium is the spoken word, who is ?? towards eloqution for example. But he’s mistaken for being an oracle, which is a slightly different thing. It’s actually nearly (..) not quite what he’s doing. No, he’s an orator, he’s creating these preformances that make you think. So what’s striking is that he seems to be talking about our world, but are probably people in nineteen sixty-eight who thought he was talking about that world. Like (..) in a sense, that’s the beauty of what he does. It’s that you sort of go: ‘ah, I can think with that!’ You know what, that’s slightly strange but I can think with that, I can do something with it. So in this case, does he not seem to be talking about Facebook, Twitter, you know, this whole world. Although, you notice that’s actually not usually an oral world, that writing has come back into play in a way that he didn’t really anticipated at all. We’ve kind of reinvented (..) a kind of scriptural world (..) that he didn’t anticipate at all.

Texting and that sort of thing.

- Yeah, like Facebook is mostly writing with pictures. Yes. So he was (..) he speaks to different times.

He spoke there in that grab to the sixties and was a major media celebrity during the sixties. Magazines, television, they loved him. In the seventies his influence, at least insofar as his appearances in newspapers and television wind. Why was that?

- Yeah, it is interesting that he didn’t come to a Australia until nineteen seventy-seven. You know, this is when the big touring acts, they wouldn’t come here until they could no longer fill stadiums in the united states and so on. He didn’t really survive the seventies. It think there was a (..) there’s a few reason for that. His popularity with the advertising industry and media executives was all based on a misunderstanding. You know, he really wasn’t there to help them, you know, sell products or sell show or anything like that. It was just he was the only person who is really interested in them and didn’t want to moralize about them, you know. They had someone they could talk to, who is wipsmart, but who wasn’t really going to help them do what they wanted to do. And I think the second thing about McLuhan is that, you know, he comes out of Cambridge University in the nineteen thirties, out of what is called the New Criticism. So there was a quite conservative side to that, there’s a quite.. even reactionary side to McLuhan. And he really did not quite, sort of, get or survive the kind of political transformations that really come home to roost in the nineteen seventies.

So as he was a devout catholic. And did that influence his work?

- McLuhan was a catholic convert, interestingly. And it’s not overt in his work. He very very rarely touches on overt political issues. His whole style was a sort of not judge, it’s just to try to find a way of creating this sort of word probes that help you think about things. But, yeah he was a catholic convert, he went to mass every day to be in communication with the eternal. They would come back to his centre and think about, you know, electric media and all that sort of stuff. And I think those things are related. I think faith was enabling for McLuhan. It’s part of the world view, it enables him to see our world in a quite specific way. The other thing about McLuhan is that (..) you know he sought out Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis after the war in exile in North-America and these were deeply reactionary, if not proto-fascist intellectuals at that particular stage. He understood the genius of their poetry, but he was kind of quite comfortable with the reactionary side of modernism. And he tries not to be overt about that. He sort of steers away from any overtly political statements.

Because he knew it would be impolitic? (..) Hard to say perhaps.

- The whole thing about who McLuhan works is to not say the obvious. Like that’s why he’s interesting, is that people would always ask him these questions and you notice he’ll never actually answers the questions. He always goes of somewhere else. But he does it in a way that works. You sort of go ‘what?’,’you know, I had these whole preconceptions about what mattered about media or a technology or about identity, oh but you’ve gone over there..’ and then you have to sort of start to grope in your own mind for a way through that. So I think he just avoided things that weren’t interesting to talk about publicly, but I think in his private life  this is a quite conservative figure. He’s not your classic sixties figure in that sense.

Certainly! Not your classic any figure! Does the description you’ve just made, does that mean he wasn’t a great scholar? He was a great orator, but not a great scholar? Or is that unfair?

- It depends on what you expect a scholar to do.

To build the existing corpus of knowledge.

- I think universities need charismatic outsiders from time to time to shake things up and show how it can be done otherwise. Like it’s one of the functions of the accumulation of knowledge. But it’s not the regular, routine stuff, which is adding sort of brick by brick our understanding of one thing related to another. There’s a sort of impersonality about scholarship. But now and then it needs this other figure. (..) As soon as he had a (..) stroke and they just shut down his centre at the University of Toronto. But the Canadians like to claim him as the great Canadian, but at the time the just sort of him out as soon as they could, you know. But it’s partly rightly that he performed a function for the accumulation of knowledge. But you wouldn’t want to craft the whole school of people who tried to sort of imitate that and be, you know, a thousand Marshall McLuhans would drive you crazy. And it would drive him crazy, because that would turn it into cliché.

Which he would have hated.

- Yeah, cliché and act-out, this is another later book that he does.

What would he make of the world today, were he alive?

- Who knows what McLuhan would think of, you know, the hundredth anniversary of .. it just is, we don’t know what to make of him yet, you know. It’s like, I don’t think he would know what to make of us. But he’d be curious about it. That’s the other thing about McLuhan, his ability to be curious about things (..) that we kind of take for granted. I think the return to literacy in digital media would have struck him as kind of curious and counter-intuitive. He thought electric media was about (..) orality and the visual and things like that and that we’ve got, if you like , a secondary textuality in texting and Twitter and Facebook that’s built on top of all of these audiovisual media. That, I think, he would find really quite striking and predicted, but if you think about it a logical development.

Is there anyone who reminds you of Marshall McLuhan alive today?

- It’s sort of the whole point that no one does, although I’ve had the kind of awful thought that McLuhan was the theory, Rupert Murdoch’s the practice. That (..) and you know, McLuhan would say he’s interested in us nosses, not noses, not in counting nose or leading by the nose or antyhing like that. He wanted knowledge. But, you could sort of pass it for, you know, if you’re a very kind of creative mind (..) for ways to build media empires. And obviously, I have no idea whether Rupert Murdoch every read a line of McLuhan in his entire life, but (..) love him or hate him you got to admit he had this extraordinary intuitive grasp of create power out of media.

—

McKenzie Wark also wrote: A Hack Manifesto [currently version 4.0] and Gamer Theory [currently version 2.0]