iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard to bemoan the fact that: "We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years."

Civilizations (or rather discourse participants negotiating the conceptual frames that define them) put great stock by the dual story of innovation and continuity. And few things are as central to the foundations of our civilization as construed by elites than books. The topos that there is something special to books that stimulates all the senses (haptic, kinesthetic, visual and olfactory stimuli all play a role) is ubiquitous and this is held to give books the edge over eBooks. It is assumed (and often stated) that there is something primeval about turning a page, sniffing the old book mustiness or the new book glue and becoming engrossed in the book's world. Of course, in the past, as now, most people engaged with books by having them read to them, often in public places. So the 'racial' memory of bookworms is likely a constructed image.

But so is its opposite of ebooks revolutionizing the world of information as we know it. While there is nothing natural about printed books, there is a lot of power in constructed images. So books will have a lot of staying power. But even if they don’t, which I hope is likely, the impact on the world is likely to be fairly minimal. As Cory Doctorow pointed out somewhere, for quite a few of the new elites (although as an elite he said everyone), the majority of the text they interact with every day is already on the screen. And as a lot of the ‘new literacy’ people correctly remind us, even in the literate population, literacy is not always (and maybe not even most of the time) used to interact with large chunks of cohesive text.

And finally, there is a limit to the capacity of consumption of information. The elites, who really matter when it comes to information dissemination, already have almost all they can handle. So the information can be made available to larger population. Which is great because that will mean infusion of new blood into the elites and formation of informed localized elites (not democratization). But hardly a revolution.

So while I be the first in line to buy an eBook reader, once someone makes one I can a) afford, b) search text, c) underline and excerpt text. I doubt it will have an impact on our civilization beyond the realignment of some of its foundational imagery. It will take a while to renegotiate the frames, but that’s just how it goes.

PS: It turns out that having written the above, there are two more pages to the article that also take issue with Appleyard’s bellyaching very much on similar ground:

So what? We have also lost contact with the primary experience of hunting killing, dismembering and cooking large beasts in order to eat, and that of being hunted, killed and dismembered by other wild beasts in the process: to name but one unpleasant experience that civilisation has deprived us of.

But rather than annoyed at having wasted my time, I'm gratified that one of my predictions, viz the impending renegotiating of frames, is upon us already. Lot of 'frame negotiation' is happening through subtle unconscious processes but much of it comes through trenchant analysis and metaphor hypostasis. Like this:

"An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. ..."

… I would suggest that the indexes of most reference books today are complied largely by algorithms, not human indexers.

And it’s not just the renegotiation of the present but also of the past:

Come off it, This might be true if the population were comprised largely of 'wisdom seeking' individuals who collectively advance knowledge and civilisation. This is not the case, and never has been. Not of academic wisdom at any rate. For generations primitive peoples without any written languages thrived and prospered through intimate knowledge, and wisdom of their natural environment. The wisdom that has advanced civilisation to what it is today has always been the province of select minority of gifted individuals who have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge and our ability to exploit the natural world.