Two Ways To See A Book

As we spin into what is called “the information age,” a call for clear thoughtful reflection becomes crucial toward understanding the nature of cultural change. In Umi Perkins’ article “Reason’s End” and Sterling Higa’s response “Reason for concern, but not the end” both writers confront the fate of reason in our time. 

Umi Perkins started this conversation with a caveat on reading and reflection and Sterling Higa provided a hopeful account of what we might gain as we move from book to screen. What I hope to bring to the conversation is an examination of what we might also lose as we shift from the “text that is moored on the page” to the “genetic text that people assume themselves to be dictation” (David Cayley, Rivers North of the Future). 

As “intellectual capital” grows to be easily accessible (at least to those of us with computers), Higa notes that the efficiency of online reading provides ample benefits especially for us islanders. “…less trees felled to make books, less shipping cost to and on our remote islands, less physical storage space needed, less refuse in our island landfills.” Electronic access to reading materials is “convenient” and results in “less harm for the environment.”

This is true. What startles me about Higa’s article is not the hopeful affirmation of the new medium of information but how his language itself contains metaphors characteristic of our “information age.” Books are cast as “intellectual capital” meant to be “consumed.” Higa’s response to Perkin’s concern for our disappearing bookstores is simply a recognition of necessary market evolution. If you fail to supply the demands of the time you’re not going to stay in business. Reflecting on Borders bookstore he writes, “Its closure reflected a stubborn resistance to change in the face of a new, disruptive technology.”

I wish to posit that such a stubborn resistance to change, though ill-fated in the case of bookstores, should be viewed not as an inflexible devotion to dying notions of reason but as a testament that, whenever something new is gained, something important is also lost. 

Higa is right: reason is not ending, it is changing. Higa’s article is a well written assertion on what we have to gain, but what might we lose as we move from a cultural trend of bookish readers to information consumers? What is lost when a whole generation of readers begin to turn away from the book and toward the screen? Does how we read and how we talk about what we read affect how we act? What about bookstores as bastions for conviviality? As a place where people can come together and discuss ideas in person (or buy coffee for each other from the now commonplace Starbucks)? What happens when we begin to lose places in which people can come to conspire, when we move toward a revolution in reading without properly considering what we are leaving behind?

In the 1980s, Ivan Illich wrote about the transformation in people’s self perception that was occurring in “the shadow of new information technologies.” As people spend more time online in virtual, non-local spaces, words lose their depth and become plastic elements in a communications code. Illich’s lament echoes T.S. Eliot’s: “Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word…Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (T.S Eliot, The Rock). 

George Orwell believed that thought was capable of corrupting language and therefore language, too, was capable of corrupting thought. Mark Twain, in his essay “Two Ways To See A River” writes, “Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too … All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”
 
So what might a book be seen as if not intellectual capital? Ivan Illich recalls Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century abbot and author who stood at the precipice of the reading revolution of his time. Illich conjures up an image of the book as a vineyard through which he slowly walks, carefully tasting and ruminating each word as he goes. The image of the vineyard emphasizes thoughtful reflection in contrast to the metaphor of capital which emphasizes marketability. We begin to view books as intellectual capital when we begin to see everything as a result of the market; books become viewed as exchangeable resources, as profitable or unprofitable, allowing us to discard them without question when something more valuable seems to come along.

What do we lose when we begin to view books as consumable entities for intellectual profit?  What we commonly refer to as information today consists of a form of collected data used in the conveying of knowable entities. Facts, scientific truths and anything you can find on Wikipedia (or read in a book) can be classified and categorized as information. But this view is static and stale and gives rise to the notion of a medium in which we ingest only to gain information. It carries with it none of the liveliness that was so important to Twain. 

The word inform comes from the old English word enforme, meaning “to give form to the mind.” This compliments Emerson’s suggestion that the purpose of a book is to inspire. We read, not just to acquire data and fact, but to undertake the dynamic process of understanding and changing how we think and feel.

French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault wrote, “After all, what would the value of a passion for knowledge be if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another … in the knower straying afield from himself?” Can one be informed, inspired and changed by something read online? Of course! How you read and why you read are ultimately more important than what you read it on. However, there may be noticeable side effects to reading from a screen, as illustrated in the Time’s article, Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? (Spoilers: The answer is yes).

As teens and college students spend more time on the computer, they also spend less time away from local spaces. Perkin’s lamentation that “young people see very little utility in actually knowing things” has less to do with books and more to do with their lack of participation outside of the web. Besides the battleground of higher education, there seems to be a noticeable lack of public forum where the youth can participate in discussion and reflection on topics such as the “decay of the book.” With the rise of potent online courses, not only is there in an incentive to watch a lecture online rather than in person, it becomes easier to distance yourself from the talk at hand. It is easier to be distracted, to wander onto another webpage, especially if the lecturer fails to be entertaining.

In this sense, I echo Perkin’s cause for alarm. What we are seeing now is a trend that moves away from reflection. If we do not prioritize a cautious but courageous inquiry into how we behave in our times, than we risk losing notions of conviviality and commonplace. If we do not take the time to confront the images we use in our language, we risk losing “the grace, beauty, and poetry” of reading to the gray maw of information.

As schools move to that new egalitarian vehicle of the internet, it is up to us to create spaces outside of the digital world where people can come together in person to discuss important ideas.  Even if the move to the screen is inevitable, there ought to be avenues of reading and living for those who wish to do without the distractions of the internet. To end on a hopeful note, at least we still have libraries. A cold sweat begins to develop when I imagine a future in which college libraries close completely for college e-libraries.