I’m not completely sure about the netiquette of blogging about a conversation heard around the digital watercooler, ie on a close-knit community messageboard; but I came across one such recently that made me pause.
Paraphrased, the thread started out asking about the ethics of going through other people’s stuff. But it moved on to the subject of snooping on others’ bookshelves. The question then became: if you were left alone in someone else’s house the morning after a date, would you make a judgement about their suitability for future dates from their book collection? The answer was an overwhelming yes.
There were a few dissenting voices who muttered about intellectual snobbery, performance anxiety about their bookshelves, or even setting traps for book-snobs by displaying their Stephen King collection somewhere prominent. But the common element was a sense that someone’s book collection is an intimate portrait of their interests and/or aspirations, and can have a profound effect on others’ perceptions – to the point of being a romantic deal-breaker.
Books as extensions of personality is a familiar theme. But the context of the conversation, an internet messageboard, got me thinking. The theme of the messageboard in question is sexuality, and hence the community self-selects for reasons that have nothing to do with things intellectual/literary. I reckon it’s fair to say it was a small but reasonably random sample of moderately digitally-literate UK women.
Now, a familiar narrative in the publishing industry says that print is dying: see, for example, Jeff Gomez, Penguin USA’s director of online sales and marketing, on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last week to promote his new (print!) book Print Is Dead. This narrative pits books against the internet, as though the latter either follows the former in some ineluctable evolution, or else the latter is a predatory force out to destroy culture as we know it. But this digital watercooler conversation, conducted amongst ‘normal’ internet-using people, suggests that these apocalyptic visions have more to do with industry angst than any widespread cultural shift among everyday users of print and digital media.
Despite a relatively high common standard of net literacy, no-one said ‘I wouldn’t care about lack of books – I’d be more worried about being stuck in a house with no wifi’. There was an overwhelming consensus that books are revealing, important and an insight into a stranger’s interests. The sense was not that digital media might replace books, but that they play different roles, and are perceived as different in kind – not just at the level of how they deliver ‘content’.
Such despatches from the middle ground might seem unglamorous in comparison with the giddy high-altitude futurism of Kelly et al, or pronouncements of the death of hard copy. But they’re worth noting. The cultural currency of books should not be conflated with the economics of producing them, such that a challenge to the latter is narrated as a collapse of the former. Though this might seem obvious, it’s one of the most common elisions in the discourse of print vs. online; it does little but muddy the debate, and has even less to do with lived reality for most people.