Last spring, the New York Times Magazine assessed the impact of the digitization of books in a universal library like those launched by Google, the New York Public Library and several universities this summer on intellectual standards in the coming decade. The Times argued that digitization would redefine a book's value by its connectivity to the world around it. The more a book referenced other works and other authors, the more it would form links to other books. Just as news sites' stories rise to the front page by generating the most hits, books would become bestsellers by frequent viewing, even if they were viewed only through a link to another book and were read only piecemeal by a reader interested in tracing one word through multiple texts.
In an essay for the Times Book Review in June, author John Updike expressed his alarm over the e-book future by focusing on the threat to the individual value of each book and, thus, to the authority of each writer. If a writer's value is his book's ability to blend into a web of all knowledge, what happens to the notion of the writer as a stand-alone being defined by his own work?
Those who trade in printed knowledge should rejoice at the potential offered by the Internet. But instead, many writers, journalists, publishers and academics approach the impact of technology with alarm.
For example, this August I freelanced at a publishing house where I had previously interned, proofreading e-Books for a new SONY eReader device. From the co-worker's cringing looks as I carried the eReader around the office, or from my boss' own skepticism about digital media, I surmised that I probably got the job because regular staffers would rather not deal with anything so high-tech and wished the book world could avoid the digital road.
A recent Chronicle of Higher Education report about a conference of university presidents and journalists on the role of technology in teaching confirmed my suspicion. Academics, including former Brown president Vartan Gregorian, speculated that by relying on technology for instant, effortless information, we have lost the urge to thrive on the process of finding information for ourselves.
What I see among my technology-dependant peers is a hunger for information beyond that of any generation before us. But our approach is one that emphasizes, as the Times suggested, linkability and relevance, the Google search. For academic pursuits, this is a boon - our predilection for looking at everything together and seeing the way ideas and texts connect will make us better comparative scholars. What critics in the literary or academic world perceive as a shift to less thorough or complete truth is simply a shift to a new model of truth concerned with relationships between ideas rather than with the supreme authority of any one set of thinkers.
For those used to being the supreme cultural authority, this is a threatening change. Today, Web sites allow anyone and everyone to publish this thoughts as an e-book online, and such "layman's" writing can be viewed alongside digital editions of classic texts on e-book databases. In a world where any user's Wikipedia entry counts as "expert" opinion, many members of the current intellectual elite fear that their the value as professional thinkers and specialists in ideas will decrease.
And their fears are not radical. Similar fears haunted clerical elites over the transition to secular education and wealthy classes over the print revolution that made information cheap. Yet then, as now, the refusal of the threatened elite to adapt to the new mode of knowledge was an act of self-destruction, ensuring only the disappearence of intelligent voices from cultural memory. Nineteenth century thinkers who continued to write philosophical tracts became the subject of obscure academic dissertations; those who tried to communicate in the new penny press format became today's classic novelists.
What alarms me, as a writer and a self-proclaimed nerd with a soft-spot for the intellectual few, is that as the literary community opts out of digitization to preserve their model of authorship - my peers - the next generation of readers, appear to opt out of reading or engaging with anything that can't be delivered on the Web.
The New York Times may survive the digital transformation; it has transformed its web site into a collection of blogs, each equivalent to one section of the print paper. By seeming to relinquish cultural authority and allowing readers to post, they maintain their cultural power, by ensuring readers still turn to the Times for truth.
They realize, as I wish more writers would, that it is better to be read in a form you're not fond of than not to be read at all.
Maha Atal '07 may not survive the digital transformation.
