The UK is one of the most watched over societies on earth with CCTV cameras in abundance, and the whole world is waking up to how much retrievable evidence the likes of Google have on us all thanks to our laptops and cellphones. (This spooky walking iphone was seen at the New York Halloween parade last week).
But is the invasion of privacy making our culture more secretive or less? Networks like FaceBook appear to be turning the once wild web into a cosy global village where all know each other’s business and keep an eye out for our digital neighbours and group members.
Privacy and the implications of social networking and user generation on our culture were key topics in a discussion about new technology on the UK internet TV company Doughty Street TV this November 5th, hosted by the Institute of Ideas.
Reading has always been a solitary activity where the individual’s imagination roams at will. There’s been a strange reversal now that book groups and recommendations from chat show hosts – Richard & Judy in the UK, Oprah in the USA – create a tiny pool of recommended bestsellers in the vast and frightening ocean of the unread. Who are the free thinkers now, websurfers or bookbrowsers?
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
I don’t think Facebook is eroding any culture of secrecy. If anything, it’s just replacing a culture of ‘privacy’ with a culture of carefully-managed self-publicity.
Also, reading hasn’t always been solitary. It only really moved in that direction when print technologies commoditise the book enough to let everyone have their own copy – a relatively recent development. In the Middle Ages most reading happened aloud, as books were just too scarce for anything else.
That said, there are some oft-repeated but still interesting parallels between orality, ‘reading aloud’ and the mass chatter of the internet. And if the internet is the new orality, then perhaps a carefully-cultivated online persona parallels the ‘reputation’ indispensable to social standing in an oral culture.
Also, reading hasn’t always been solitary. It only really moved in that direction when print technologies commoditise the book enough to let everyone have their own copy – a relatively recent development. In the Middle Ages most reading happened aloud, as books were just too scarce for anything else.
That said, there are some oft-repeated but still interesting parallels between orality, ‘reading aloud’ and the mass chatter of the internet. And if the internet is the new orality, then perhaps a carefully-cultivated online persona parallels the ‘reputation’ indispensable to social standing in an oral culture.
I know this sort of thing gets repeated around here fairly often – that reading as solitary act is culturally constructed, and something that happened with the rise of the printed press, thanks Father Ong – but 500 years can only be construed as “recent” in a geological sense. There’s a subtext in this kind of argument glorifying pre-literate culture, which I think is a bit mystifying. It could be argued that most of what we value as human rights have developed since that point, many of those developments are wrapped up in print culture to some degree; I think we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
I don’t think sMary was arguing for an abandonment of the rights of man…. 🙂 What’s interesting is how those sets of values that we cherish, and which came of age symbiotically with print and so get very wrapped up in our conception of the book, might get preserved, or better, revised in the new technocultural context.
Bob has argued that defense of the print book is often just coded language for defense of the individual, who many feel is under threat from the new technologies and the new patterns of existence they seem to dictate….think John Updike’s rant at Book Expo a year ago about books needing to retain their edges (read: individuals).
If you think of the print book as a stand-in for the individual, and solitary reading as a stand-in for the cultivation of enlightened thought, then losing these things would indeed seem to be a bad thing. But the material world that grew up out of the Enlightenment is not such a pretty place, and though our technological advancements are awe-inspiring, they’re almost certainly not sustainable. Individualism, then, and its technological corrolary the book, are almost certainly due for a rethinking (a judicious and careful one of course), the hope being that a shift in consciousness (and in the technical means for activating and transmitting it) could change the world for the better.
> reading hasn’t always been solitary.
…
> In the Middle Ages most reading happened aloud
i hear people didn’t bathe often back then either.
but i don’t know if there’s any _truth_ to that.
(the bathing. i believe the reading aloud part.)
-bowerbird
Dan: your ‘geological’ arguably packs as much hyperbole as my ‘relatively recent’ (surely you can’t be considering anything that happened prior to the founding of the USA as prehistory?). Anyway, my point was not to propose some nostalgic glorification of pre-print culture but merely to offer a check on the tech-positive progress narrative that crops up more or less covertly around here (thanks, Father Kelly) as often as the nostalgic one.
Attempts to balance the ‘Things are getting relentlessly better’ rhetoric of modernity are not covert attempts to rehabilitate the positive aspects of public hanging and the Black Death. I wholeheartedly agree that we should not be throwing babies out with bathwater (though I suspect the Enlightnment philosphers didn’t have any such scruples about the culture they were busy transforming); I picked up on that point simply because I’m uncomfortable with recent(ish) realities being transformed into eternal truths.
Ben’s summed up the correspondences being debated much more succinctly than I could. There are wonderful things about the culture the Enlightenment has left us with; there are also some horrifying ones. It needs looking at carefully – and for that we need to try and see what’s happening in the context of as broad an historical trajectory as possible, so as to avoid the pitfalls of focusing on some notional ‘always’ or supposedly ever-improving ‘future’.