Things as They Are.?

Library or Tower?

Matt K. has started a bit of a debate over on his site about the significance of Google's recent foray into digital libraries. Many have lauded this move as a gigantic leap forward for us thinking (and, potentially, non-thinking) humans and, in many ways, they're right-- these non-locational and democratic ideals of unfettered access to Knowledge have long been prophesized by, among others, Ted Nelson and Jean Francois Lyotard, who saw computerisation as a mode of both reinforcing and crippling existing power structures of institutional legitimation.

So soon we'll have Google Library (or Google Ocean as I've heard it referred to). What does this mean for knowledge bases? Certainly, the project isn't nearly as all-encompassing as the press would have us believe. Indeed, Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, who, admittedly, has quite a large stake in this issue, says he is hesitant to the idea of calling this library an end-all-be-all to current physical collections, pointing out that, aside from the (many) books that have entered the public domain, several million others will only be searchable by excerpts. Gorman remarks that: "The English language with words out of context doesn't really mean anything," which, of course, is entirely true if also a bit simplistic.

I can't help but feel that we're missing something in this debate. Although it's worth noting that (some not so innocent and unentrenched) opportunities will be provided for access to those books that appear excerpted (ala Amazon.com or, simpler yet, from public libraries), its perhaps more valuable to note that our initial revulsion at this excerpting belies a deeper truth to our interaction with "books"-- we stopped using them as a whole a long time ago.

This is not to say that there aren't still hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, who, when preparing for a project, a presentation, an exam, still read their sources from cover-to-cover but, rather, that there are just as many who have become quite adept at engaging, dissecting and interrogating a text without reading every word of its contents. And I'm not just talking about undergraduates or high school students here. I'm talking about us academics, editors and writers who, over the course of several centuries, have made the book the segmented, random-access device it is today. We've indexed, glossed, paginated, tabled, paragraphed, margined, hypenated, quotated, tabbed, notated, bookmarked, chaptered, footnoted, endnoted and bibliographed the hell out of this technology. In other words, we've made sure that there are ways in virtually every book to circumvent the front-to-back, left-to-right reading habits that we claim to hold so dear. In short, we've made sure that the book is no longer a sum of its parts; it is, rather, parts that can, if the user chooses, form a sum.

Now I'm not saying that there won't be huge benefits from this service, nor am I arguing that the potential for abuse in student and, let's face it, scholarly research, isn't huge as well. I think that it would be interesting to investigate the propagation of certain quotations from this service as they are spread across student papers. I imagine that we'll be seeing many similar quotations over the next few years of teaching.

Having said that, I realize the paradox of my statements-- does Google Library really highlight the random-access possibilities of codex texts or does it obliterate them entirely?

Me? I Want a Reel-to-Reel.

And as a special holiday gift from Things As They Are.? to those in the blogosphere, I give you the wonders of modern magnetic tape technology. And yes, that is the devil's voice you hear at the beginning. Dave wasn't raising no Chipmunks, it seems. More like an appliance salesman, a radio intern and a speech pathologist. The song is now twice as long. You can decide if that's a good thing or not.



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rev 1.1--And, no, this doesn't work for Michael Jackson.

Things Comes of Age

Well, friends, today is an important day for Things As They Are.?. Indeed, today is the day that everything changed. What happened, you ask?

I got my first comment spam. And it was glorious.

UPDATE: Yes!!! It happened again!!!

<<Why be a man when you can be a success?>>

Good question! Carry on, brother! Show me the way!

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Great idea! I would love to relax and forget about pain with order soma online! And to think-- some people actually complain about this so-called "spam". Grow up. They're just trying to help.
rev 1.2--I could actually use a soma after cleaning this mess up.