Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Read online

  10. James Johnston, ed., The Alba Amicorum of George Strachan, George Craig, Thomas Cumming (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1924).

  11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” in The Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 120.

  12. Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 121–52.

  13. Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 187. See also Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  14. An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club in Edinburgh: In a Letter to a Honourable Member of an Athenian Society There (Edinburgh: J. M’Euen, 1720).

  15. Otto Dann, “Die Lesegesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts und der gesellschaftliche Aufbruch des deutschen Bürgertums,” in Buch und Leser, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1977), 168.

  16. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 2000), 131–32.

  17. Bertrand Badiou et al., eds., Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 137.

  18. Readers interested in a good history of computing should see Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Computing, trans. E. F. Harding (New York: John Wiley, 2000), and Atsushi Akera and Frederik Nebeker, From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  19. Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 65.

  20. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2002); and Adrian Johns’s location of the openness of hacker culture in the tradition of pirate radio. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 357–400 and 463–96.

  21. Antoine Hennion, “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 103.

  22. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 4.

  23. On “wreading,” see Michael Joyce, “Nonce upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 579–97; and on “produsage,” see Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008).

  24. Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012); Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Crown, 2012); Sven Birkerts, “The Room and the Elephant,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 7, 2011.

  25. G. Post, K. Giocarinis, and R. Kay, “The Medieval Heritage of a Humanist Ideal: ‘Scientia Donum Dei est, Unde Vendi non Potest,’” Traditio 11 (1955): 195–234.

  26. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). For reflections on the unity of technological consciousness, see Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010).

  27. The Athenaeum, no. 22 (April 8, 1828): 335. I am indebted to Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 60, for this reference.

  28. James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?,” Duke Law Journal 47, no. 1 (1998): 87–116.

  29. Adrian Johns, Piracy, 497–518. For someone with such a capacious view of the history of IP, we need to take Johns’s argument very seriously.

  30. See Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab, eds., Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). For Jaron Lanier, the myth of open source is a means of disempowering a creative middle class. When creative content is free, only the few who aggregate content and sell advertising through aggregation are the ones who make money in this new system. Google, Facebook, and YouTube make the money, not the individuals who make the content. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Knopf, 2010).

  31. For a critique of the Creative Commons along these lines, see David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons without Commonality,” Free Software Magazine, no. 5 (June 2005): http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality. For Brandeis’s decision on ideas as being common as air, see International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 US 215, 250 (1918). For an updated explication of this idea, see Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2010).

  32. Leigh Hunt, “Pocket-Books and Keepsakes,” in The Keepsake (London: Hurst, Chance & Co., 1828), 17.

  33. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” 126.

  34. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” Selected Writings, vol. 2.2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005), 486–93.

  35. David Cressy, “Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England,” History of the Book in the West: 1455–1700, vol. 2, ed. Ian Gadd (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 502.

  36. See Isaac Mao’s manifesto that emerged from Ars Electronica 2009, in which he describes cloud computing as “a vast social brain in which every Internet user is a metaphorical neuron.” Isaac Mao, “Cloud Intelligence,” Human Nature, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 21.

  37. Mimi Zeiger, “Only Collect,” Domus, February 23, 2011, http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/only-collect/. See also the thoughtful reflection by Frank Chimero on the nature of digital sharing of found objects: http://blog.frankchimero.com/post/5427297332, as well as his “dialogical” blog: http://www.themavenist.org/.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Alfred Kelletat, ed., Der Göttinger Hain (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967).

  2. John Keats, “Endymion,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Modern Library, 2001), book 1, lines 460–61.

  3. Manuel Joaquim Silva Pinto, “Investigating Information in the Multiscreen Society: An Ecologic Perspective,” Digital Literacy: Tools and Methodologies for the Information Society, ed. Pier Cesare Rivoltella (Hershey, PA: IGI, 2008), 207–16.

  4. For the definitive study on the representation of reading, see Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  5. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 137.

  6. In addition to Bachelard, the classic treatment on this topic is Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). On miniature books, see Louis W. Bondy, Miniature Books: Their History from the Beginnings to the Present Day (London: Sheppard Press, 1981), and Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison, Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures (New York: Grolier Club, 2007).

  7. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 155.

  8. As the character Thomas Abrams from The Rings of Saturn remarks on his making a miniature of the Temple of Jerusalem: “Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time. But on other days, when the evening light streams in through this window and I allow myself to be taken in by the overall view I see for a moment . . . as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity.” W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 248.

  9. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1997), 306.

  10. The history of the re
lationship between reading and work is largely untold at the moment. For an excellent discussion of the way reading, and in particular rereading, was integrated within the rhythms of everyday productive life in the nineteenth century, the way it was made “workable,” see Deirdre Lynch, “Canon’s Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use,” in Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–110.

  11. Erich Schön, Der Verlust der Sinnlichkeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 63–72.

  12. Edgar Allan Poe, “Philosophy of Furniture,” in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levin (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 17.

  13. Charles Baudelaire, Parisian Scenes, in Complete Poems, trans. Walter Martin (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 235; Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Joel Faflak (Peterborough: Broadview, 2009), 98–99.

  14. Siegfried Kracauer, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 10.

  15. The classic work on zines is Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997).

  16. For a discussion, see Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).

  17. See J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Schocken, 1962), 134.

  18. For a great example of this practice in action, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” in The History of the Book in the West: 1455–1700, ed. Ian Gadd (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 451–99.

  19. Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1890), 27

  20. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 31. For one of the best-known discussions of fragmentary reading as a form of “poaching,” see Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 165–76. For a discussion of such practices in the early modern period, see Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79. For the nineteenth century, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  21. Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Knopf, 1999).

  22. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 40.

  23. Pervasive or ubiquitous computing seeks to locate models of “continuous interaction,” which “leverage” our interactions with the world, moving computing “off the desktop” and into “natural interfaces.” In this, pervasive computing is both deeply spatially aware, but also aims to become a kind of computational unconscious, so that it runs in our mental and experiential “background.” See Gregory D. Abowd and Elizabeth D. Mynatt, “Charting Past, Present and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7, no. 1 (2000): 29–58. As the editors of the volume Small Tech write, “The next wave of new media studies will need to examine the ecological interrelationships among the virtual space of the Internet, the enclosed space of the installation, and the open space of everyday life.” Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, eds. Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), ix. See also Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

  24. For a useful introduction to the field, see Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, eds., Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), and the “Special Issue on Locative Media,” ed. Drew Hemment, Leonardo Electronic Almanac 4, no. 3 (2006).

  25. As the editors would write of the “Newsmonger” in The Tatler in 1710: “He had a Wife and several Children; but was much more inquisitive to know what passes in Poland than his own family . . . When I asked him whether he had yet married his eldest Daughter? He told me, No. But pray, says he, tell me sincerely, What are your Thoughts of the King of Sweden?” The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 59.

  26. Ted Nelson, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 301–38.

  27. Giselle Beiguelman, “Egoscope”: http://desvirtual.com/egoscopio/english/about.htm.

  28. http://about.nonchalance.com/philosophy.php.

  29. Fan Di’An and Zhang Ga, Synthetic Times: Media, Art, China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  30. There are a number of new media works that take the tree as their conceptual starting point. See Anne France Wysocki’s beautiful animated text Leaved Life (2005), or Eduardo Kac’s mind-warping bio-art, Natural History of the Enigma (2009), which melds his DNA with a plant he calls an “Edunia.” The text here produces a leaf that is also part human, taking Goethe’s book-inspired invocation, “All is leaf,” to a entirely new level.

  31. The most exhaustive treatment of this idea occurs in the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose corpus is dedicated to illustrating the intellectual and social consequences of moving from a hierarchically organized society (of trees) to one based on “functional differentiation” (of fields). For an introduction, see Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

  32. See Chad Wellmon and Brad Pasanek, “The Bibliographic Enlightenment” (forthcoming).

  33. For Descartes, the plane was the ideal space of rational knowledge. For Friedrich Schiller, the plane marked the beginning of human history recounted in his elegy, “The Walk” (1795). For the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger, the “clearing” signaled the beginning of becoming human, and for the postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the unbounded plane was refined into the “plateau” as the new ideal form of knowledge. The plane persists as one of reason’s primal scenes.

  34. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 100.

  35. New library projects have been featured as showcases of urban as well as civic renewal in cities such as Seattle, Montreal, and Manchester, England. For a discussion, see Shannon Mattern, The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

  36. According to the American Booksellers Association, membership of independent bookstores has increased 25 percent since 2005. For examples of new bookstores, see Ooga Booga in Los Angeles, Word in Brooklyn, or the self-publishing pop-up store Blurb in New York. Of course, these won’t last, but that is largely the point—to imagine more provisional, recessed, and materially fluid ways of interacting with books.

  37. Jeff Greenwald, “Long Overdue, the Bookmobile Is Back,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 23, 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Long-Overdue-The-Bookmobile-Is-Back.html.

  38. This term is inspired by Alan Liu’s idea of the data “pour” to describe the nature of reading online—the way data is poured into the reader’s view, but is never permanent, like water. The data “pore,” on the other hand, is a way of thinking about the holes in networks, the places where our reading is not measurable, where we can intellectually “breathe.”

  CHAPTER 7

  1. For an introduction to the history of writing, see Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).

  2. As N. Katherine Hayles writes, “electronic text is a process not an object.” N. Katherine Hayles,
“Translating Media,” in My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 101.

  3. David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). An important forerunner of this critique can be found in the work of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). See also Friedrich Kittler who speaks hyperbolically of “the 2000 year-old war between algorithms and alphabets.” Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 230.

  4. For an introduction to the major works in the field, see Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Steven E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

  5. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 354.

  6. The classic work is Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Harper Row, 1970). See also Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 107.

  7. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 280. For a brilliant reflection on how the riddle has served as a means of understanding the nature of things, see Daniel Tiffany, “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 72–98.