Battle in Print: The Medium is Not the Message

Tim Black, 2 October 2006

Speculation on the future of the printed and bound book has ebbed and flowed with each technological innovation since the phonograph. Now it is the turn of electronic media to lay claim to a printless future. But whereas previous forms such as film, radio and television have sometimes been cast as rivals to print, the claim inspiring the current round of hype and foreboding is that emerging technology will upgrade the written word. Ebooks offer features traditional books cannot.

Students will be the big winners. No longer forced to squint their way through several tomes by desk-light, ebooks allow the user to search for specific bits of text, annotate on screen, and link through to referenced material via the web. And of course, just as an MP3 player can store many albums worth of music, so a book reader could contain a miniature library, drawing on the vast Oxford, Harvard and New York collections, provided online copyright issues are resolved.

However, there is more attributed to the technology than mere utility. In 2003, a report commissioned by the Department of Education and Skills concluded, albeit tentatively, that access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) among school children was associated with better grades. The report suggested that children with computers at home were more inclined to work outside school. This does not mean that a generation of cyberdidacts is emerging, merely that through the informal use of a home PC children could not help but pick up various ‘networked literacies’, be it via games or surfing the net. More to the point, they associated ICT with fun, not school. So by further integrating ICT into the study of English or history, for example, it should be possible, so the report surmises, to exploit their use of email or internet for academic ends.

Though rarely presented with such naked pragmatism, the new media’s ‘educational’ properties are often cited. Of a new mobile phone service that boils selected literary classics down to a few lines of plot, Steve Brabenec of Dot Mobile states: ‘Text messaging is now one of the key forms of communication amongst young people and we wanted to realise its educational qualities. We are confident that our version of ‘text’ books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy’. Where the book, rich with negative connotations, is rebarbative, ICT is accessible and up-to-date.

But if the electronic media lends itself to a touch of hyperbole, it serves the tragedians of culture equally well. ‘Our notion of the book’, asserts John Updike, ‘is of a physical object, precious even if no longer hand-copied on sheepskin by carrel-bound monks…that books endure suggests we endure, our inner tale not writ in the water of e-ink.’ Elegance aside, there is a desperation to these sentences. Identifying the trivialisation of literature with the expansion of e-media, the medium of the book comes to stand for what is being lost – literature’s authority.

Philip Pullman shares this anxiety, finding the sterility of reading from a screen incomparable to the sensory intimacy of reading a book. But this visceral engagement bespeaks a more profound involvement: ‘If it’s an old book so much the better, you know that many hands have turned these very pages, many years ago’. An old library book, he suggests, possesses an aura, tied up with knowledge that it has been read before, a sense that by reading it again one will be partaking of the same source of knowledge, sharing the same authorial vision. This is reflected in the library buildings that house them, ‘a feeling that people come here to go about the business of thinking about important things, of finding out truths, of extending their knowledge’. This, it is implied, is precisely what people will not do in the virtual libraries of the technophile’s edutopia. Whilst e-media can make works of literature easier to get hold of, easier to understand even, it can do nothing to say what should be read, let alone why or for what reason. And ‘to raise literacy levels’ is not an answer. That could be achieved with holiday brochures.

Underpinning the anxiety is a fear that literature’s aura will wane beyond reprieve. Hence the yearning for an age in which the book was taken seriously, as the organ for knowledge, indeed, truth. Updike’s allusion to monasteries is telling. Reading the Book for a ‘carrel-bound monk’ was the most serious undertaking of all. But the gravity with which scripture was treated had little to do with the material on which it was carried. And when Matthew Arnold famously defined culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, there was no mention of the most accessible medium. It becomes apparent that what Updike and Pullman detect in e-media’s assault upon the book has little to do with the different media themselves. As with e-enthusiasts, so for the bibliophile too: the digitisation of the book, of knowledge, comes to be synonymous with the dissolution of the work’s authority. It’s just that what one side mourns, the other embraces. So, when advocates of e-media hail the potential transformation of our cultural bearings, citing increased ‘interactivity’, or the ‘democratisation of knowledge’, all they are really doing is acknowledging a situation in which the sources of knowledge have been divested of authority. And there is nothing technological about that.

There is a lesson here from literary theory. Whether Roland Barthes or WK Wimsatt struck the final blow, the author’s death provoked agitation across university humanities departments. Reading had finally been liberated from the hermeneutic straitjacket of authorial intention. As neither a book, nor a work of literature, the new object of study, the text, could be read, to quote Walter Benjamin, ‘against the grain’ – the phrase rehearses interactivity – and made to yield politically useful conclusions. Rendered fodder for the affirmation of contemporary mores, offensive themes could be filleted out (so as not to exclude readers), or made to shed critical light on the society in which the text was generated. From being a source of ‘knowledge’, as Arnold had it, a ‘stream of fresh and free thought (to be turned) upon our stock notions and habits,’ canonical works now found themselves serving these very notions and habits. ‘Interactive’, ‘democratic’, reading promised not to challenge preconceptions, nor to reveal another world, but to provide a pallid reflection of what is.  The death of the author marks the point at which the assault on tradition, its authority, was academically institutionalised. Its legacy was less the continued ‘jouissance’ of emancipated readers than the hollowing out of the humanities’ raison d’être, for it was now impossible to seriously believe that they humanise, that they cultivate our humanity.

It is not that the classics are no longer being read or taught – Education Secretary Alan Johnson recently insisted that writers such as Defoe, Austen or Conrad would stay on syllabuses. But without a sense that the great books are guides to the world, that the vision contained within is worth engaging with in its own terms, precisely because it transcends the ‘is’ of our present, then any appeal to their ‘value’ is just so much cant. To read seriously is to long for more than what is given.  However, unless the expectation of truth is cultivated, that a work of literature is a world of insight apart, then what is read and why, be it from some musty tome or off a palm top, ceases to matter. For what determines the esteem in which works of literature are held, their value, is not the means, but the end, the conviction that what is being said must be listened to. Franz Kafka once wrote: ‘[W]hat we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us’.

Tim Black is senior writer, spiked

 References

Paradise is Lost as Milton enters the mobile phone age, John Clare, Daily Telegraph, 17, November, 2005

The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Pupil Learning and Attainment, C. Harrison et al., Becta, March 2003

Will we all be switching to ebooks?, Bobbie Johnson, Guardian, 6 April 2006

E-read all about it, Robert McCrum, Observer, 15 June 2006

A treasure house for Moomins, Biggles, and well-thumbed pages, Phillip Pullman The Times, 25 March 2005

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