Digitizing literature and styles of reading

by Dominik Lukeš ·
Digitizing literature - The Boston Globe But the act of reading a great book requires something of the reader: time. A book must be ''read," it can't be background noise nor can it be understood from a page. If books are reduced to just another streaming media, how does an author foreshadow an event or delight us with a surprise ending? Can the works of James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald or those of Zadie Smith or Khaled Hosseini be absorbed from one-page instant messages, broken up by advertising and video images? By: Jim Bildner, the founder and chairman of The Literary Ventures Fund and Ande Zellman, its editorial director.

This is a great example of essentialism assuming that there is only one style of reading and that all books (with the possible exception of reference material) require the same approach. In fact, human cognition operates with both models - I like to call them the ‘aphorism mode’ and the ‘tome model’. The first model relies on the evocative power of the ‘pithy phrase’ and the centuries old obsession with quotations only attests to its compelling nature. The second model, assumes that one needs to be fully immersed in the context of any speech, and to ‘understand’ a philosopher or a writer requires familiarity with the entire text or even oeuvre. But human cognition would be impossible without both modes being available to us. On a higher level of cognition (even though I find the concept of levels of cognition and language very problematic) it is often the case that a single phrase may help the reader make sense of an entire novel and vice versa. To ‘truly understand’ a work of fiction (or scholarly writing) one would have to immerse themselves not only in the work itself but also in the attendant acadmic discourse.

At any rate, it is dubious that Amazon’s search feature which so worries the authors will have such far reaching consequences on reading. And even if it does, it will not necessarily be to the detriment of our civilization:

To an already endangered publishing ecosystem, the prospect of spoon-feeding bits of digitized literature seems to be the last thing our civilization needs. If we're not careful, our children, and the society we create around them, will remembers bits of this so-called ''printed record" without ever knowing the joy of having read a book cover to cover. They won't even remember what a book feels like.

The authors go on to complain that a friend’s son graduated from a private school without ever reading a complete book. That may sound distrubing on one level but first we must realize that this has been the default state for most of humanity for millenia. I would venture that there will always be about 10-20% of the population who will devour complete books regularly for the sheer pleasure of it. But one of the most dangerous things is to foist our private pleasures onto other people. It is only a short step from telling people that they must read to telling them what they must read (because, of course, only certain literature can truly be considered reading).

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2 comments archived from the original WordPress blog. New comments below.

  1. Meg
    You delve deeper into this, D., and I was relieved to read your thoughts. I've been so disappointed in Pat Schroeder, representing the, I think, narrow interests of publishers, in trying to push back to this rising tide of access -- inevitably water through their fingers, I believe. In Speak, Memory, V. Nabokov wrote about the moment of realizing, as his parents swam with him, their child, that they and he both moved through the time as through water, together but so separate. Who decides and how to direct this flow of time, of information, culture, art? Doesn't sluicing it so carefully through certain viaducts withhold its benefits? Are people who know the joys of diving down deep in a book the modern monks guarding their illuminated manuscripts against a new dark age? I guess I don't think so. I can see where, as a writer, my value seems to be receding, and writers and publishers as well as muscians and record labels have reason to fear these great changes as threats to their livelihoods. A screen cannot induce the same trance in me that a book can, and I will admit to, and cling to a feeling of superiority associated with this. But we are talking about an inexorably rising tide -- popular culture having already wiped out the leveees protecting childhood. Will it all drown us, our ability to discriminate lost? I don't think so, and in the end I'm optimistic. Believe me, I stay up late worrying about about quick-cut television viewing from infancy rewiring my kids' brains and scrambling the flow of their attention and even sympathy, and the water-bug, scatter-shot approach to understanding they sometimes lead with. But I've been buoyed up by the Google-talk too: Innovate, and the money will come after. Allow access, and the understanding will follow? In some ways, it's the Greek ideal of the universally educated democratic society. (I know, I know: they meant free males.) Just since the WW II, we've found out that both sexes and all classes are not only educable, but that human potential is much greater and more varied than we imagined. Couldn't the kind of malleability and reformation of culture and beauty and understanding possible through the internet unleash even greater human potential? Isn't to resist digitizing public domain books the same as turning public libraries into subscription ones? It's futile anyway--way past time anyone's finger could stop up the dike. Another Pollyanna thought: just as diversity and tolerance is the only way to keep the real world safe, isn't diversity and access also necessary to maintain the freedom of cyberculture? I would instead keep touting the joys of dipping down deep in the well--so many of us know that this is how real writers are made--and not be too hard on water bugs on the surface. End with a random, commercial thought: if Google finally helps me find a fair-use fragment that has haunted me, I would sometimes to often want to buy that whole book--if it's out of print, couldn't a publisher now print me one on demand? Couldn't this go somewhere "profitable" for publishers, the way e-bay has allowed people to buy so many odd little things they have a hankering for, but never could have found otherwise?
  2. Dominik
    Thanks Meg, I'm glad you found my line of thought of interest. However, I am equally skeptical of the Aquinian or Hegelian notion implicit in your comment of the 'ever expanding' human potential (whether we're assuming it reaching a pinnacle at some point or not). I'm much more inclined to Levi-Strauss' view of functional equivalance - e.g. between sciece and magic in a society. So while societies (and individuals in them) are undergoing undisputable structural changes (many of whom could be viewed as spandrels -i.e. something happening just to keep things holding together), it is an open question whether we can come up with a view of the ever expanding human potential. All these changes can simply be said to fulfill the human potential in different ways - just as the invention of agriculture might have done. Diversity, as you say, is essential but only as a way of protecting the core 'genetic inheritance' not necessarily as a way towards universal good. (Some interesting thoughts have recently been published with respect to this on the conflict between feminism and multiculturalism.)

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