Who am I without books? Books make me? A book in hand I am contemplative—reflective--in conversation images open my mind—I run for a pen to catch on the page ephemeral thought conveyed in words. I wish to communicate has found my words. I am a writer. I am a woman once silenced. Women continue to be silenced. Tyrannies burn books. Books contain dangerous ideas. Books are lost and found. Where books are in short demand—where book are banned—the mind atrophies.
Jay David Bolter’s introduction “Writing in The Late Age of Print: computers, hypertext and the remediation of print," is both a concise history of the printed book and its death knell, thankfully, even Bolter admits rings somewhere off in the distant future. Bolter's comparison of digital media with linear writing in Writing Space, published in 2000, points to the difficulty of forecasting digital media. Electronic book readers were just a twinkle in Bolter’s eye, a desire, a dream, when the novelist Annie Proulx complained about the “twitchy little screen.”
The printing press as Bolter illustrates with the passage from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris was a threat to authority. “Alas!” The printing press was revolutionary where digital media is transformative. The requirement of an electronic apparatus of some sort, computer, reader, smart phone, cell phone, and a connection limits accessibility. Although print requires accessibility to a press of some type, at minimum rudimentary, at the point of central production, low-tech distribution of printed multiples (pamphlets and broadsheets) is cheaper and easier (hand outs, dropped from a plane, sides of buildings, including graffiti) with little or no financial cost to the consumer.
Although we think access is a given according to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University 2010 Final Report, Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy around the world," the U.S. ranks from 7th-19th in comparison to other countries in penetration, speed and price. The 2010 ITIF International Broadband Ranking analyzing the same areas of accessibility ranks the U.S. overall fifteenth in the world. The creation and maintenance of broadband infrastructure requires large investments from government and-or corporations.
One could point to the Iranian Green Party to show the success of digital media in distribution of images from the protests, crackdowns and the iconic image of the shooting death of Neda Agha-Soltan by Iranian security forces. However, the Islamic government was soon monitoring, restricting, and blocking digital media as did the Red Chinese government in the case of Google that eventually lead to Google shutting down it site. “Human Lobotomy: Second Draft” raises the alarm of corporate infringement on the open and free use of Internet trying to monopolize access to the Web, similar to what happened with the print and radio limiting access to one-way corporate providers.
In light of electronic readers portability and readability, the one advantage books continue to maintain is affordability (unforeseeable at the publication of the 1st and 2nd editions of Write Space). Below are prices of electronic book readers not including the price of book download:
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G, 6" Display, White, 3G Works Globally - Latest Generation--$189.00
Select your iPad
Wi-Fi 16G1 $499.00 32GB1 $599.0 64GB1 $699.00
3G
16GB1 $629.00 32GB1 $729.00 64G1 $829.00
Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook reader – $149.00-$199.00
Bolter credits digital media’s challenge to the printed book for the lost sanctity of the author, up ending writing conventions, and democratizing reader response. However, Roland Barthes announced the “Death of the Author” in 1968 and Michael Foucault, 1969, wrote an essay “Who is the Author?” Bolter’s focus on the19th and 20th century literary canon erases Feminist Literary Critique’s new readings of traditional texts and experimental polyphonic texts that decenter the single voice of traditional linear texts, as he notes, “Our culture has used printing to help define and empower new groups or seek to forge a new one,” but mid-sentence returns to the silencing tactics of gatekeeper’s warning (don’t even think of writing) “the task of forging a new readership requires great talent and good luck.” What is great talent? And where is mention of small presses whose dedication to publishing experimental and literary texts that do not meet corporate publishers’ bottom line. Small presses at the head of the very reason for the assault Bolter notes to, “This ideal of cultural unity through a shared literary inheritance, which has received so many assaults in the 20th century, must now suffer further by the introduction of new forms of highly individualized writing and reading,”
However in his head-to-head analysis between printed books and digital mixed media Bolter barely mentions postmodernist metafiction, writing across genre, and experimentation with form, in references tucked into tight sentences, “However, the printed book as an ideal has been challenged by poststructuralist and postmodern theorists for decades.” I personally read and write texts Bolter describes as books printed in the Middle Ages, “This strict requirement of unity and homogeneity is relatively recent. In the Middle Ages, unrelated texts were often bound together, and texts were often added in the available space in a volume years or decades later. Even in the early centuries of printing, it was not unusual to put unrelated works between two covers.” I suggest Bolter undermines the reader when he insists on comparing digital media to traditional linear printed books. Bolter basis, “The question is whether alphabetic texts can compete effectively with the visual and aural sensorium that surrounds us,” his entire binary of vital digital/dying print is based traditional linear texts and denies the presence of prose in combination with images Bolter knows not to be true, writers incorporate images, visual artist incorporate text, and both do so with and through digital media.
But what came first the influence of digital media on the book or the book’s influence on digital media? Two mix media books (text and image) that come readily to mind are Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy published in print 1759-67, and William Blake’s illustrated books of poetry i.e. The Book Urizen published 1818.
work in progress--had problems importing video and line spacing
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