notes on the future of writing and reading

We began this semester talking about the print book as a form of reading technology. We end the semester reflecting on the fate of the print book in a digital world. Critics have been predicting the death of the print book for some time. At the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1992, hypertext author Robert Coover boldly declared the end of books in the New York Times. His prediction was premature. An obituary for hypertext fiction would have been more apropos.

But it isn’t just books that we should be worried about. It’s the fate of writing and reading that should concern us. In terms of digital communications, we seem to be moving away from textuality and towards visuality. That is, people increasingly communicate with each other using applications that are more visual than textual. Video chat at Skype is just one example of this; in the near future, such applications will become commonplace and communicating by writing will no doubt decrease. This is even more true of the applications we use to entertain ourselves. We are more likely to view video than to read an article online. Games are less reliant on writing text and are increasingly immersive due to improvements in visual simulation.

The question then is: will we still be writing and reading 50 years from now?

The National Endowment for the Arts would seem to think no. In fact, based on a 2004 NEA study entitled “To Read or Not to Read,” they seem to be panicking, accusing digital applications for a large decline in reading, which they envision continuing until there is no one left who can read or write.

The report has a summary. What I offer here is a summary of their summary.

1. Americans are reading less

• adults and young adults reading less books
• reading declining amidst teens
• college students read less (for PLEASURE)
• young people reading less literature
• reading print competes with other media
• spending on books dropping

2. Americans are reading less well

• reading scores for 17 year olds down
• reading scores for high school seniors down
• reading proficiency rates stagnant or declining for adults
• reading for pleasure correlates with academic achievement

3. Social costs of reading decline

• employers rank reading and writing as top deficiencies
• good readers generally have more financially rewarding jobs
• less advanced readers report fewer opportunies for career growth
• good readers contribute to cultural and civic life
• “good readers make good citizens” (voting, etc.)
• deficient reading tied to drop out rate
• deficient readers more likely to be unemployed
• deficient readers more likely to be criminals

4. Summary of findings

• Less reading for pleasure in late adolescence than in younger age groups
• Declines in reading test scores among 17-year-olds and high school seniors in contrast to younger age groups and lower grade levels
• Among high school seniors, a wider rift in the reading scores of advanced and deficient readers
• A male-female gap in reading proclivity and achievement levels
• A sharp divide in the reading skills of incarcerated adults versus non-prisoners
• Greater academic, professional, and civic benefits associated with high levels of leisure reading and reading comprehension

You may have noticed some problems with the report; I know I did.  For instance, you can replace “poor people” for “deficient readers” and get similar results. That is, it might be poverty rather than a lack of reading that is the main problem in the decline of reading. Also, the report equates reading with literature. It is possible that people read much more than they used to, but not works narrowly defined as literature. Also, the report equates reading with print. Again, it is possible that people read more, but what they read is electronic rather than print.

The point about (non digital) readers being better citizens is particularly egregious given the last U.S. presidential election, in 2008, in which Barack Obama mobilized people via the internet and the Web to an unprecedented degree. Digital technology has made many people more active in politics and civic life, rather than less, as the NEA report claims. (Not to mention all the people in North Africa and the Middle East right now who are using Web 2.0 digital media such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to organize and transform their societies).

Matthew Kirschenbaum, a professor at the University of Maryland (and author of one of our first assigned readings), gives an eloquent rebuttal to the NEA report in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In terms of the future of literary reading and writing, we can dwell on the negatives, like the NEA. But there are other reputable critics and scholars who do not think that people are becoming cretins because of their use of digital technologies. For instance: Robert Darnton, who is a print culture scholar, and thus very invested with print and books, but someone who also acknowledges the benefits of the digital, in his article “The Library in the New Age (2008).” While he notes some of the downside of migrating writing and reading from print to the digital world, he is also fairly confident that print works will continue to be read and used in our digital world. More specifically, he thinks “brick and mortar” libraries will continue to play a vital role in society.

His article is basically a review of Google Books, which is digitizing entire libraries as part of an effort to digitize all human knowledge found in print. In his article Darnton declares his main point: “I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.”

This is of course very true of the current state of digitized information. But what is changing is not just the material manifestation of information, in print, but also our ways of thinking about information. Basically, the digital revolution is making us not worse, but different, readers. And in fact, digitization of information encourages us to read more critically:

I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

Darnton goes on to show how every form of communication, beginning with writing, is unstable and unreliable. The way to deal with this is to preserve as many copies as possible. That is why, for Darnton, libraries are so important.

He begins his article summarizing the four big breakthroughs in communications technologies.

1. Writing. “the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind’s relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history.”

2. Scroll to codex. “The second technological shift [is] when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. . . It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader’s aids.”

3. Moveable type. “The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s. Gutenberg’s invention . . . spread like wildfire, bringing the book within the reach of ever-widening circles of readers. The technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.”

4. Electronic communications: “The Internet dates from 1974, at least as a term. It developed from ARPANET, which went back to 1969, and from earlier experiments in communication among networks of computers. The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981. Web sites and search engines became common in the mid-1990s.”

What Darnton implies is that we’ve had momentous changes in writing and reading technologies before, and none of them turned people into illiterates, despite the fears of critics (in fact, they were all responsible for large increases in literacy). However, Darnton returns to his point that information is unstable and needs to be preserved. The reason that “brick and mortar” libraries will continue to be important is that digital communications, because of the huge volume of digital information and the rapid changes allowed by digital technology, are particularly unstable.

Here, summarized, are Darnton’s eight reasons why we will continue to need libraries:

1. Google won’t be able to replicate every book in every library. Even within editions of print books, there are important variants, which means that one copy is not enough.

2. Many collections are excluded from the Google Books digitization effort. Google has signed on quite a few libraries, but even Google can’t expect to get every library to participate.

3. Copyright keeps some books from getting fully digitized. All books published since 1923 are in copyright based on the formula: the life of the author + 70 years. Those who benefit from this copyright structure, authors and publishers, fear people will be able to download their books for free. That is why they have sued Google.

4. Digital technology is inherently transient and potentially obsolescent. What this means is that many of the works Google is digitizing may be inaccessible in the future due to changes in storage technology. This has given rise to a whole new field, digital forensics, which attempts to not only preserve documents but also the software and hardware needed to read those documents in the formats in which they were originally created. Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum, mentioned above, is a major thinker in this field. See his Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008).

5. Google makes mistakes. Even a casual perusal of Google books will make this clear. Scholars are constantly complaining about these mistakes, many of which are due to OCR (optical character recognition) scanning.

6. Even digital copies become degraded or corrupted over time. What happens when your digital file is no longer accessible? You go to the library and find a print copy to copy or scan.

7. Searching technology makes some books hard to find, and doesn’t give us all variants. This will no doubt improve over time, but the sheer volume of new “born digital” works, added to digitized print works, will always mean that some books will get lost in the data deluge.

8. Digital applications cannot replace physical act of reading material book. This is the strongest argument for book preservation for some people: the physical experience of looking at, touching, even smelling books. This is not something that a Kindle or any electronic reader can reproduce. Darnton puts it this way:

Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book. For example, size. The experience of reading a small duodecimo, designed to be held easily in one hand, differs considerably from that of reading a heavy folio propped up on a book stand. It is important to get the feel of a book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding. Its physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.

This brings us back to one of the main ideas in this class: media matters. The medium in which a literary work appears affects the way it is read. A book is not a hypertext or a blog or a Facebook entry. Each of these media determine to a large extent how something is said and read. It follows then that in order to preserve the way a literary work is said and read, we need to preserve the medium in which it appears. This does not mean chucking digital media in favor of print. But it does mean preserving the physical book and the places where such books are stored: the library.

Works Cited:

“The End of Books”
Robert Coover
New York Times (June 21, 1992)
http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/370/EndofBooks.htm

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
“To Read or Not to Read”
http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf

“How Reading is Being Re-Imagined”
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Reading-Is-Being/17111/

Robert Darnton
“The Library in a New Age”
New York Times
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-library-in-the-new-age/

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