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the network made visible: some thoughts following the january retreat 
01.25.2007, 4:59 PM
1. Disclaimer
I've structured the following as a kind of schematic history, and histories are always to some degree rhetorical. So I offer this in that light, as a set of speculative pathways, from the tradition of print literature, through the Net, to some ponderings about what the shape might be of a culture able to wield and interweave both without privileging either.
I've left in-depth discussion of oral culture to bigger brains than mine.
Oh, and I know this is rather long for a blog entry. Is there a politer form I could post it in?
2. Summary
I've had a look at what I know of the tradition of the print book, its reader and its writer, so as to compare this culture to that enabled by the Internet. From this follows some more schematicising about the ways in which the roles of 'reader' and 'writer' invert and converge within the Web, and to suggest how an attempt to translate print-specific notions of either to a networked environment risks a category error. I've touched on what I see as a misguided emancipatory idealism around network technologies. I've offered some mildly manifesto-like thoughts on how the writers of the future/present might bypass this to put network technology in perspective, and finally on how the form of the Net might help us imagine truly multimedia culture capable of withstanding ecological or political disasters or, even, the collapse of the internet itself.
3. The tradition of the book
I've listed five attributes that I see as important to the tradition of the book. There are of course counterexamples to all of them; the aim is not to try and totalise a tradition that in many ways contains me, but rather to foreground some common and often unexamined assumptions that underpin the tradition of the book.
Physicality - Books are physical: text and sometimes pictures organised in a linear form, and collected in physical libraries.
Authority - Books are time-consuming and expensive to make. Their 'authority' exists in proportion to this scarcity. The implication is that no-one would bother laboriously to typeset, print and bind drivel; so if a book doesn't make sense then the fault lies with the reader. , and hence failure to comprehend a text lies with the reader, not with the text. This principle of authority in proportion to scarcity can be seen by comparing the medieval reverence for hand-copied books, through to modern offhand treatment of mass-produced 'airport novels'. Authoritative texts reinforce their authority with reference to one another.
Fixity - The physicality of books perpetuates the impression of text as something immutable. This physicality also give rise to a tradition of books holding otherwise ephemeral knowledge in fixed form for posterity, and thus of books' being timeless in a way that human life is not.
Universality - This is the trope most heavily challenged by twentieth century theory. The traditional ideal - and arguably the central proposition of the canon - is that books marked thus are of value to everyone, regardless of who, when and where.
Boundedness - Being a physical object, a book cannot contain everything.
4. Reading and writing in the print era
NB: I've taken for the purposes of this essay a tradition of print reading and writing that holds fairly good for English literature from approximately halfway through the eighteenth century.
The tradition of the reader
The reader approaches with a sense of reverence books that, he - for, traditionally, it is a he - understands, conform to the tradition of the book. He enjoys a typically solitary experience of relatively passive communion with its content. He may write in the margins of the book, but does not seek to change the actual text. The reader accumulates knowledge from his reading, which gives him status in the world, and reads as much with reference to other books as to life.
The tradition of the writer
The Writer is held to be the sole author of his words. He is the avatar of Authority: words arranged by him carry a supplemental charge of value specific to his status, and must not be appropriated, rearranged, misunderstood or otherwise corrupted. The name of the writer comes to stand for the aggregate of all discussions had about his work. The above is considered not a historically-specific set of assumptions but a set of eternal truths.
5. The Net
Into the midst of this (by the 80s rather stale) tradition the Internet arrived. In some ways, it resembles an acceleration of the transmission of knowledge hitherto accomplished by printed media, and as such a logical step 'forwards' into an era where communication can potentially become total. I wish to argue that this is not so.
The Net is not the replacement for texts of the kind I defined under 'the tradition of the book', nor does it enable the tradition of the print reader or writer to continue in any recognisable form. Rather, the Net is a manifestation - and a partial and politically lopsided one at that - of the cultural phlogisthon within which such texts have hitherto been created. Rather than offering a new format for print culture, it enables a kind of communication related to it but fundamentally different. In particular, the kinds of authorship and Authority that constitute its invisible structures are deeply different.
Writer and reader converge
So what happens to the traditions of reader and writer? They converge. The networked reader is also writer. She goes beyond passive reading/consumption of content to participatory activity through blogs, message boards, MUDs, email/IM, social networking tools and so on. Rather than a fairly stark division between 'professional' writers and their readers, quality is decided by reputation and easily trackable readership. Good Net reader/writers function as personal-recommendation mechanism, helping the less discerning (or less concise) to filter the Babel of content available. A new literati begins to emerge, operating as filters, commentators, curators, consolidators of online content, and/or creators of algorithms for channelling it.
The promise of utopia
The Wild West of the networked world reveals many voices hitherto unseen. As such it has bred much utopian rhetoric. The Web will emancipate the poor, educate the underprivileged, make visible the unseen etc etc. Some of this is at least partially true. But among the utopianism of information lurks a what Hakim Bey calls the 'Gnostic fallacy' of attempts to tnrascend the human body altogether in online self-reinvention and apolitical late-consumer wish-fulfilment. Yiffing, adult chat, conspiracy theories, slashfic, Robin Hood fantasists, conspiracy theorists. Anyone can speak out and the Net will carry their voices.
Meanwhile, the commercialisation of social networking, incursions of PR into viral memes and ARGs and other colonisations of this discursive space continue apace. Far from seeming straightforwardly emancipatory, the West is looking more and more like a chance to make a quick buck from those too dumb to read between the lines.
And up in the clouds, the new literati continue to proclaim a uotpia that conveniently elides the 'digital divide' to propound a networked future that skips blithely over matters such as war, climate change, political fissures and the like. Instead, we are to hail the Web as apotheosis of human ingenuity, repository of our collective memory, successor to print culture and ever more inevitable helter-skelter toward 'the singularity'.
It is as though the price of free information is cultural atomisation and commercial rapacity, and the utopia of the Web a kind of autonomy and diversity that only holds in the disembodied and self-referential online world.
Whither Authority?
On the Net, readers write, and writers read. Anyone can self-publish. So, following the principle that the status and authority of a text is in direct proportion to its scarcity, to write is no longer to be the privileged accessor and producer of canonical, authoritative texts. Notions of authorship and any but the most provisional and conversational kind of intellectual leadership become meaningless.
The boundary between 'worth reading' and 'worthless blah' is blurred by the visible, trackable emergence of content from the swamp of chatter. And, watching content emerge, it is plainly impossible to posit for the Net a set of human-centric values as (however speciously) the literary canon allowed. The Net has no transcendental signifier except itself, no cohesion to celebrate except that of technologically-enabled pseudo-diversity.
The grammar of the Web is not one of human languages or literary forms, but one of computer languages. Online, the Writers (in the sense of those invested with weight, status and Authority) are software developers. No text writer may have the final word; nor will he shape the grammars he works with. Coders, on the other hand, create the enabling conditions for interaction. Online tools, social networking apps, tagging devices and so on are the online equivalent of literary genres and rhetorical turns. It is no coincidence that creators of ARGs, the closest contemporary contender for consideration as a Net-native literary form, are as likely to be skilled at cryptography, concealing IP addresses and scrambling QuickTime as arranging paragraphs or working up a good gradatio.
6. Temporary certainties
The transformation of Authority online into positionality and consensus relativises the tradition of the book beyond any attempt by that tradition to appropriate the energy of the Net, or vice versa. But that does not mean that the tradition of the book and the culture of the Net exist in some kind of presumably teleological continuity. Rather, they operate in counterpart to one another: if the tradition of the book encompasses authority, fixity, universality, boundedness and physicality, the kind of reading and writing enabled by the Net represents positionality, ephemerality, specificity, endlessness and abstraction. The culture of the Net is the photographic negative of the tradition of the book. From all this it follows for me that to attempt to translate the tradition of the book onto the Net would be a fundamental category error. But knowing this doesn't render that tradition useless.
One unique and beautiful property of the Net is that it makes visible a discursive penumbra within which emergence, complexity and the activity of entire networks are rendered visible and imaginable. This is having a profound effect on human culture: from the current Lynx advert to the kinds of stories, movies and theories people want.
The Net's ability to render visible the exquisite chaos-patterned micro-complexity of discourse in formation makes impossible to discuss books solely with reference to one another, or else with reference to nothing but the author's experience. It is further untenable to propose authority, fixity and so on as having any kind of objective or immutable value as - once translated online - these values become their inverse. But it is the uncritical acceptance of the truth of this tradition which is obsolete, not the kinds of interaction that tradition made possible. Extended thought, offline storage of human culture, tactile interaction with words and thoughts from the past - all these things have been discussed elsewhere on if:book. As 'temporary certainties', the traditions of the book still have much to offer.
To gallop towards an entirely networked future, without scrutinising its relationship to our past, is to risk abandoning several thousand years' worth of admittedly partial but by no means worthless human history. And, in Santayana's words, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
7. http://www.getafirstlife.com
In conclusion, I want to return to that aspect of the tradition of the book that has been most thoroughly obscured by that tradition's self-created mythology: the physicality of the book. In this context, it stands for the physicality of us, human beings with finite lives who eat and sleep and are busy running our planet out of resources.
The physicality both of the book and of us returns us to two things. Firstly, the desire to upload our consciousness into the Net conceals some dubious assumptions. And secondly, pre-Web technologies of communication don't just disappear. The vision I have of the future of intellectual discourse is one in which this multiplicity - and the consciousness of multiplicity that is gained from experiencing the wild diversity of the Web - is foregrounded. I want to see orality and print not superseded but augmented and recontextualised, in an on- and offline web of discourse that includes viral messages, community fanzines, micro-literature, print libraries, desktop printouts of Web-circulated literature annotated in Biro, along with printed books and online communication.
I envision the place of the Web in this network not as a disembodied space for self-reinvention, sexual fantasy and transhuman pseudo-utopia but as a tool connecting actual, physical communities conscious of themselves as such. At its best, I see the Web's quality of visualising emergence and complexity as a potential means for our culture to realise a decentralised culture where hierarchical governance and centralised culture are seen as the mirages they are.
Online, I envision a multimedia environment that broadens the concept of 'reading' beyond the strictures of the canon, without losing sight of what the canon achieved. In this culture, I imagine the writer as bard, coder of groups and websites, custodian of community history: the author not as individualised transcendental signifier of a self-referential canon hell-bent on erasing the material and political traces of its production, but as selector and archivist of culture, equally capable of poetry-slamming or handling a printing press, manual typewriter, word-processing package, server and local wifi network. I imagine both readers and writers conversant in the specific qualities of different media and capable of translating between them without privileging one form.
8. I hope apocalypse doesn't arrive in my lifetime
So, in conclusion, I see the Web as having the potential both to drive a disastrous atomisation of human culture, and also - perhaps - beginning to seed the kinds of community that could still redeem us from this fate. But I think that in order to avoid the former, it is essential that the relativising force of the Net is itself relativised, however provisionally, and that it becomes a tool in our service and not we in it. We owe ourselves a deep engagement with these new technologies, and with the patterns in human culture that they render visible.
But to stop there is to render ourselves desperately vulnerable. What the Net teaches us about human culture needs to be translated into cultural forms that could - if required - survive the death of the network. And that includes thinking through the tradition of the book and learning what we can from how it has structured and filtered knowledge to date. And it means avoiding the temptation to translate this tradition into a form structurally other to it, and risk hollowing our culture worthless in the process, but to look for ways of embodying the best of our past that make fruitful use of the new tools we have.
Which parts of the tradition of the book does the Institute for its future still support?
Posted by sebastian mary at January 25, 2007 4:59 PM
Comments
The hope would be that one doesn't base the future on digital information, but that digital information becomes an integral part of our inquiries. Its advantages as tools for swift communication, its dangers as an instrument of the market, its inherent elitism, and so forth.
We are experiencing today this sense of "progress" and excitement that the information era has brought along. Hence, the importance of institutions/groups that not only use and create the instruments, but that provide forums for discussion about those tools while they emerge. We do have the possibility of the democratization of intellectual discourse and its dissemination, if not on an egalitarian level, as we also have the digital divide and the rampant commercialization of the Web.
The infinite proliferation of information has brought along the correspondent need to consume it. We need to establish filters that help guide and measure that production. Instead of using tools to escape the limits of human condition, we can use them to connect to our limits by exposing them. It is not "digital decision-making" as Illich says, but the hope of using those tools to face our limits. When the infinite is offered to us at our fingertips, we experience the anguish of our human limitations. It is not a blind belief in instruments, but the cautionary tale they offer. Our humanity in front of their artificiality.
Interestingly, Illich ends his interview with a long talk about Mexico City and the way its inhabitants, those who receive less than 3% of the water that goes to households, have been able to exist thanks to inventive forms of self-governance. He concludes with the idea that it is this people, these survivors, who enable us to look "behind the mask of our certitudes about the future to recall the lost hours and places." When we just stand on social constructs, all our fragility is evident. Consumption becomes our stronghold. Instead of restoring, we manage. Can we afford to forget the past but to not believe in the future? As a Latin American I never cease to be amazed by the inventiveness of its people, and their ability to adapt and adopt both the past and the future. Perhaps our lesson resides there.
Posted by: sol gaitan at January 26, 2007 5:02 PM