Subject/Object

I’ve been having this horrible feeling lately.  I’ve been reading a bit from Google Books on the screen, but just as I get into the Introduction of a book I am hit by this.

And by the time I write down the title of The Idea of Europe: from antiquity to the European Union, I’ve already lost interest. I am not going to spend time trugging my ass to the library every day and read from the various 20 page parts which are relevant to me.   Maybe I could have just read the Introduction and the relevant chapters, took notes, and had been productive from sitting in front of a computer.

But who can read it there are pages missing? It is not that I want to necessarily read every page, but I don’t have a choice in what I can’t read. The Algorithm does. And though the Algorithm can make compromises here and there it is not perfect because it is not me. Depending on the strength of the application of the rules you can see more–sometimes even an entire work. But sometimes you only get

The question then becomes, how much would you pay to read the entire book.  I don’t think I am necessarily ready to pay a large amount for access to a database for music, but I would pay quite a large sum to have Google Books serve me every book I would want to read.  It is fast, it displays the books well.  And yes it messes up metadata for old books. It is not actually the new God, despite some popular opinion.  But going to a true research library is a horror.  For someone who actually cares about looking at to old editions of Charles Dickens, the 1871 and the 1873 editions, the academic research library is much more like the library in Eco’s nightmares.  As a member of the public, not a student, I pay a 60 dollar alumni fee to use the print collection.  If I am just a regular person I think I would pay $120.

And these are not even delivered to my house.  And yes, us priests of the book know that schlepping your ass to the library stacks builds character.  But I’d think that actually using the books more effectively and productively builds a more useful kind of character, no?

I don’t think that there really is a danger in the intellectual tenor of the Internet.  Reading on the Internet will be different, not better or worse, and it is our job to study and interpret the differences.  But I wouldn’t  say that people are fleeing away from books towards the Internet.  Those who can successfully navigate it see its other benefits and we can’t wait for books to catch up with us.  People want to have access to books in the Internet culture.  Students enjoy the convenience of having books they mostly likely are not reading anyway, and those who are more senior citizens of the Internet often express that we wish to  have an opportunity to read more books online and through our devices.

The fact is that the companies who control what culture has become, a commodity industry, have an interest in this relationship of manufacturing physical objects.  But I am ready to offer quite a large sum to have everything on a subscription basis.  And I promise I will continue to buy books.  The best books you need to have by hand to read multiple times, to write in the margins.  To take to the mountains and to the bathroom. But we have to own up to the fact that, like every other form of human production, most books are really bad.  Or to be more generous, most books have little relevance to what I am thinking about right now.  Maybe a chapter, maybe an essay out of a larger collection.  Maybe chapters 3 and 5 and section 2 of chapter 8.

People already have the option of paying $120 for limited access to a library. And yes, the access is limited by its physicality because you can only carry and deal with so many physical books at time.  And they don’t even deliver for that price.  I would be willing to pay more, more than $200 for sure, and I’d have to think about what the maximum I’d pay would be.  If the Government in the person of its Libraries cannot get this done, why should I not be ready to pay Google Books?

I agree, Google is making its money off of the backs of millions of dollars on public investment.  So it is unfortunate that Google is going to do what everyone wants them to do: give us a repository of books.  All books, because we already have all music, all video.  Those who are in love with information in a long form (like there are music aficionados) will pay money to have books delivered to us wherever and whenever, and in ways that we find relevant to our own work.

I have been reading an excellent work by communication theorist and political economist Vincent Mosco. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace examines the myths we have been spinning around the rise of the Internet: that it will change politics and social interaction, and generally bring us into a new enlightened age.

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.