“For the past several hundred years intellectual discourse has been shaped by the rhythms and hierarchies inherent in the nature of print. As discourse shifts from page to screen, and more significantly to a networked environment, the old definitions and relations are undergoing substantial changes. The shift in our world view from individual to network holds the promise of a radical reconfiguraton in culture. Notions of authority are being challenged. The roles of author and reader are morphing and blurring. Publishing, methods of distribution, peer review and copyright - every crucial aspect of the way we move ideas around - is up for grabs. The new digital technologies afford vastly different outcomes ranging from oppressive to liberating. How we make this shift has critical long term implications for human society.”
Thus sayeth Bob Stein, the Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. This institute is dedicated to delineating the role of the written word in the digital age, leaning heavily towards digitized libraries. I have heard many literati of the older generations gripe about the digital coup. People no longer write letters they say. People are losing their literacy and their attention spans they worry. Certainly there is some truth to these concerns, however, didn’t people stop writing letters a long time ago? Hasn’t literacy in America been pretty dismal before everyone had a personal computer? I would argue that the new and popular digital world offers a whole new array of possibilities for popular literature. People who normally don’t really read at all can have a chance to read 16th century books by Francis Bacon, for instance, free thanks to Google Books. Yet, that is one critique, Google seems to be making the most effort to make books available for free on the internet and many find this large corporation suspicious for that very reason.
All in all though, the internet is largely populist. You can find blogs by a redneck in Texas, an Indian poet, or photographers in Sarajevo. All people and all opinions get to be broadcast on the internet with little or no cost. In the past, books tended to be a product of upper and/or white classes. Now anyone can write anything in an internet cafe and someone 3,000 miles away can read about it. I obviously think this is a great development.
However, while all this populism makes for a lovely chaos, the digital world leaves little in the way of long lasting mementos. Whereas medieval Irish sagas written on parchment or the U.S. constitution written on hemp can last hundreds of years, what about digital words? Sure we can read everything as long as the internet is up and running. But oh…let’s say we run out of fossil fuels…or WWIII causes global insfrastructure to fail–what happens to all those digital words? They become lost to the ether. This is kinda scary, yet also a liberating way to ‘live in the now’ as they say. What does the future hold? I have no idea, but right now I enjoy the knowledge free-for-all that is the world wide web.
