The first part of the book details that myth, from Marshal McLuhan to Alvin Toffler to Nicholas Negroponte. What I am enjoying right now is the second half, which goes on to show that other technological developments where lauded in their time with the exact same language that we use to describe the Internet.

Any of these quotes sound familiar:

The Telegraph

• “the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world.”
• “Our whole human existence is being transformed.”

Electrification

• “It is no longer a matter of choice whether or not one shall become acquainted with the general facts and principles of electric science. Such an acquaintance has become a matter of necessity. So intimately does electricity enter into our everyday life that to know nothing of its peculiar properties or applications is, to say the least, to be severely handicapped in the struggle for existence.” (does this call for Electronic Literacy anyone?)

The Telephone

• the harbinger of “a new social order”
• “a moral obligation for a considerate husband and a good citizen.”
• This would lead to an acceleration of democracy in politics and social life since we are all equals on the telephone.
• others welcomed the likely breakdown in class and family boundaries.

Radio

• “the greatest force yet developed by man in his march down the slopes of time.
• “a means for general and perpetual peace on earth.”
• “it has restored the demos upon which republican government is founded.”
• “Every home has the potentiality of becoming an extension of Carnegie Hall or Harvard University.”

Television

• “a torch of hope in a troubled world” (seriously!)
• will make “the attendance of classes in any one place…as obsolete as the buggy of twenty-five years ago”
• “television will usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
• The new medium was predicted to be so potent that writers began to speak of a “pre-television” era and admonished those who were foolish enough to cling to the “habits of thinking” that characterized this time as “trapped in another anachronism.” (Library 2.0?)
• “Television is no instrument of imperialism. It belongs to the people as does radio. It comes at a time in history when the world needs to have an eye kept upon it for the welfare of civilization.”
• Additional examples give new hope for community television in low-income areas, for direct contact with candidates for electoral office, and for a transformation in the quantity and quality of citizen communication with government officials.
• “an “information highway.”

What Mosco is arguing is that, sooner or later, all of these new technologies become banal. He notes at one point that the average home now has 8 radios. Where the telephone was once seen by people as some kind of mythological device, now we do not think twice about it. In the 1930’s television was to be this great democratic and educational tool–now we see it as exactly the opposite.

So too with the Internet. This honeymoon many of us are still having with the Internet, and certain sub-technologies on the Internet (Blogs/Tagging/Social Software will save the world!) will quickly come to the end as new youngsters cease seeing the technology around them as something sacred, but as something purely profane.

Yesterday as well I spent the day reading a soon to be published book of philosophy, and wrote my little review in the late night. This morning I got an acknowledgment from my editor, and I had a chance to re-read what I had written.

It made me think how connected to this older kind of librarianship the act of writing book reviews continues to be. I admit that it is also connected to that aristocratic ideal that librarians would be the judge of good books, but I think I really enjoy looking over a book, considering why it would be good or useful, and giving my little judgment of its contents in order that other people can inform their decision.

I have always felt that I was more of a reader than a writer, or that I enjoyed the process of reading over the process of writing. But I do find it easy to write about books, regardless of how connected I am to the Internet or whatever is supposed to replace books.

I ask this questions as I read a great book by Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry Into Cognitive Authority (1983). It examines in detail the process by which we come to recognized others’ ideas as correct ones. It follows another really great little book by Wilson called Two kinds of power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control (1968) which has a really great section on how it is that we decide on the subject of a work. Both of these are highly relevant, and both of them I discovered for myself.

Or the theoretical works of Henry Evelyn Bliss, particularly The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences (1929). Difficult, yes. Dense, yes. Interesting, thought-provoking, yes. Another great book–this one was suggested for a class, but by a teacher which explicitly goes against the current–is Living with books: The Art of Book Selection (2nd ed. 1950) by Helen Haines. What a wonderful book of bibliographic love! Is basically a manual on how to look at books, how to evaluate them, how to weigh other’s evaluations of them.

So I question why things like there are ignored. I am sure there are more of them, but I don’t know them all. Why are important abstract works of this nature ignored? I am sure that the concrete nature of the profession has changed, but are we not qualified to evaluate the foundations of that work? Are they no longer applicable to today’s world? I would argue no.

To tell you the secret, it is my plan to glean ideas from these old works to inform my future writing. Not only will I seem well read (because I will cite them), but in reality all of these new ideas people pass around have foundations in older works.

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.

Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.

So I direct you all to read dive in to mark’s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:

Act VI: The act of learning If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.

Ankit Gupta

School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was. Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.

Dilevko has gone through the history of publishing and the current state of the publishing industry, dominated by huge media conglomerates and excessive advertising and cross-promotion. Opposed to this is a selection of books weighed by time, evaluated through numerous reviews and analysed by literary experts. For the corporations, it does not matter that the books are “good”, but only that they are read (or that they win one of the hundreds of book-awards that now exists). Risky artistic books are slowly becoming a rarity.

The question the class continually reaches is this: either of these positions is inauthentic. Why is it any better that one group of people tell us what to read over another group. The choice he presents, and I think it is a great conclusions, is this: it is true that someone is going to tell you what to read. Would we rather give that power to a corporate process which cares only of the bottom line, or to the evaluation of history? Would we rather be marketed to, or would we rather take a wait-and-see approach to what books will be considered worth of recommendation.

As for the question of the “superiority” of supposing that we can educate people, Dilevko quoted Reading Lolita in Tehran to the effect of saying, why do those better off think that those worse off do not want to read good books? Is this not more discriminatory, thinking that everyday people will not or cannot read classics?

Now, discuss.

Dear Werke:

I am sorry I had to take you from the shelves, in all 12 volumes of beautiful cracking covers and yellowing paper. Apparently your lack of barcode signaled that no one had checked you out in almost 20 years. I am not a rare book expert, but I am pretty sure, given the death of Schiller in 1805, you are a first or second edition.

To the rest of you, some of you are even older than the Schiller and some of you are relatively new scholarly works that have obviously not been opened once since you were purchased. Some of you were donations in memory, ex libris Professor Long-Since-Passed-Away.

Most likely none of you will ever be read again.*

Sincerely,

Steven

• Quoting Steven’s new supervisor in charge of the logistics of moving things to the up-town storage facility: “If we do our jobs correctly, hopefully no more than 3% of all these works will ever be requested again.”

But, at least while alive, at any one time someone’s thoughts are never static. Particularly when engaged in a major ongoing investigation and inner debate, we often believe one side of an issue over another. Not just in one’s lifetime, but while walking down the street. In debating with others we are won over to their side in one debate, and maybe at a further time we keep our convictions.

We have this almost religious belief, however, that one’s books are one’s final thoughts on a subject. Who’s to assume that someone hadn’t changed their minds after their last book, died with a death bed conversion. Should we not say “Augustine’s thoughts” but only “Augustine’s writings”? And what about the possibilities of deception, irony or even self-deception, fighting a position we don’t want ourselves to believe. Do I even know my position in a self-conscious fashion?

David McGee from the Burndy Library at MIT presented to us the manuscript of Michael of Rhodes, a unique look into the intellectual life of a fifteenth century commoner. Lost for 400 years, McGee exhibited the manuscript as the life’s experience of a common mariner who worked his way through the ranks from oarsman to the highest non-noble post in the Venetian fleet. And, in turn, that life explains some anomalies about the manuscript itself.

Filled with mathematical problems, tables of calendar dates, navigational calculations and ship schematics, the book contains much of the knowledge required to outfit and direct both individual ships and entire fleets. Curiously, however, the work lacks technical detail and contains errors in many places. McGee contends the work is not an instructional manual or a personal aid but was used to exhibit the seasoned mariner’s knowledge to the nobles, merchants, and important citizens of Venice. The highest posts in the Venetian fleet were won in highly contested elections and the manuscript was created to set Michael above similarly experienced Venetian citizens. The expense of such an undertaking illustrates the life-long zeal of a foreign commoner to insert himself into the highest positions of Venetian society.

Those attending were amazed by the condition of the manuscript, save for the final, well worn, page. Containing Michael’s illustration of St. Christopher bearing the Baby Jesus, it was often touched for luck on Michael’s long voyages around the known world.

Now Google has joined the party [party?]. At google.com/bannedbooks, you can use Google Book Search to explore some of the best novels of the 20th century which have been challenged or banned.

Oh really? Google, your left hand promotes “Celebrate your freedom to read”, while your other denies the same rights to the Chinese as you censor your search results.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger? Can you get Orwell down from the shelf for me, Big Brother?

I think you could consider this the first activist or social justice writing. De la Casas was a contemporary of Columbus, and this 1552 work decries the slaughter of the Central and South Americans by the conquistadores. True, he was the Bishop of Chiapas, and thought that the Indians should have been converted to Christianity, but he also felt that the Spanish were quite unchristian by killing them by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of whether they heard the Gospel or not. There are some graphic descriptions, which are not really worth repeating, they are written again and again throughout human history. But I enjoyed this:

Once he [a minor Native Central American official] was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar who was present, a saintly man, told him as much as he could in the short time permitted by his executioners about the Lord and about our Christian faith, all of which was new to him. The friar told him that, if he would only believe what he was hearing, he would go to Heaven there to enjoy glory and eternal rest, but that, if he would not, he would be consigned to Hell, where he would endure everlasting pain and torment. The lord Hatuey thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes.

And the non reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”

So when I go to make comments on these books, you must realize that I haven’t read all of them, and may not for quite a long while.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. Vintage (used). There is another edition of this from Routledge, and I would have rather had that one in order to match my copy of On the Order of Things. On the other hand, this one matches my copy of Discipline and Punish, so what am I going to do? Have read half way through; I find Foucault can go off the rails on occasion, but you have to hold on to get to the good parts.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. Everyman (new).

I got this at overstock price, and it is wrapped in plastic, so I have been resistant in opening it. It matches a nice copy of The Idiot that Xuan-Yen gave me, although that one has a wonderful picture on the cover.

Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth Of Nations. Random House. (Used, first edition, my book looks much better than this picture, and I dislike when I can’t find a correct Amazon image)

I have a copy of her Dark Age Ahead, which was short and interesting. I’ve also read The Life and Death of Great American Cities, which I loved at the beginning but I felt dragged as it went on. I didn’t know this was a first edition when I bought it, but with what little bibliographic knowledge I have, it is hard cover, and there is only one printing listed, so I am pretty sure no one has read this since it was published.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins. (new)

What can I say? The book that started it all, really. I’ve read and own quite a number of his works, but I have always felt something was missing without this one. Even the Translator’s Preface, which I’ve worked through, was enjoyable. Although the real task lies ahead, which I approach with a little trepidation.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Perennial. (used)

I don’t know how I feel about this edition. I have a very old used edition of the first part of the work which I got free from discards of a book sale. I didn’t have an entire edition, but sometimes, you know, you get a book home and you dislike the smell of the pages—and this is how I feel about this one. Important book, though, good to know how much reading and political participation the average American was involved in.

Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala (used) The Diamond Sutra & The Sutra of Hui-Neng Shambhala (used) An exception to my above quotation about not reading books right away, when it comes to religious texts, particularly Buddhism, I always dive right in. I find I particularly enjoy reading Buddhism on the subway, especially when I read about the Bodhisattva, or the Buddhist saint. Hui-Neng was the Sixth Patriarch of Zen (Chan) in China. I had forgotten about him from my Chinese Philosophy class, and the stanza which won him the robe, begging bowl and the transmission of the dharma. His competitor had wrote:

Our body is the bodhi tree And our mind a mirror bright Carefully we wipe them hour by hour, And let no dust alight.

The Fifth Patriarch was less then impressed. Hui-Neng, a foreigner, was forced to pound rice and was not allowed to attend dharma teachings. In secret he wrote his own stanza on the wall:

There is no bodhi tree, Nor stand of a mirror bright, Since all is void, Where can the dust alight?

I think after reading Buddhism it allows me the opportunity to meditate at being content with my current situation, both personally and professionally.

Aside from the hundreds of towns and villages in the British Isles that provided enthusiastic new readers, there are submissions written from would be volunteers living in Austria, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Holland, New South Wales, Indiana, Calcutta, New York, San Francisco, Ceylon, Arkansas, New Zealand, and Wisconsin

He didn’t mention Canada, but oh well.

It would be interesting to me to compare the lines of code in the Linux kernel to the amount of text in the OED. I wonder if the amount of work done for the Dictionary is the upper amount of work that can be humanly possible without the use of computer systems. In many ways the OED resembles the centralized and controlled chaos of the Linux kernel.

At the bottom we have the people who submit patches, equal to the volunteer readers. Next we have the people who are responsible for their respective sections, I don’t know, memory handlers and input/output drivers and such. They resemble the assistant editors whose job it was to take the quotations, sort them out, and make some sense of them regarding age of the quotation and reliability of the source. Next to last we have Andrew Morton, right hand man to Linus, who is represented by Henry Bradley, who himself was responsible for some sections of the Dictionary, working concurrently to Murray (and who in turn became editor when Murray died). And at the top, James Murray, who stood on the shoulders of all those who helped to make the final decision about what got in and what was kept out and how best to package the entire thing.

I mean, granted, it was Victorian England: most of the contributors were very learned and the women who did contribute were totally left out of being credited by name in the first printings. But, to do all that without even a typewriter is stupendous.