Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Morphological Politics of the “Book”
As netizens, we have internalized Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message”: if somebody comes up with a new medium, we immediately jump on the bandwagon and reduce our thinking to 130-character-aphorisms-with-a-tinyurl-attached.
Of course, cultural critics are lamenting the demise of traditional media such the newspaper or the pop album but the media-realists have told us that technology shapes the form and the challenge for media industries is to adapt or perish. It is conventional wisdom that if new media allow for disruptive modes of production, discovery, search, or distribution, existing media will wither away. Friedrich Kittler developed the framework to reflect this interrelationship between modes of production and text in his seminal work, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks1800/1900) and in later texts argues that in today’s world all forms of texting will converge into a general repository of knowledge.
However, there is a certain discursive silence about the withering away of the book, our all-time favorite medium. Even bloggers admit to posting to achieve the prized book deal and the world’s foremost e-commerce operation was founded around the love of the book.
So to figure out what will happen to the book, to get to the bottom of the morphological politics of the medium, we need to ask tough questions about how “Aufschreibesysteme†constitute, shape, and delimit the “booking†experience in the emerging network society:
Writing:
What is special about the process of writing a book, how the production cycle forces us to slow down our thinking to a level where we actually mean what we write?
Editing:
We need to ask about the economics of editing in a world where often the author is also the editor, proof-reader, and peer-reviewer.
Interface:
We need to ask about its interface, which combines high-cost, low storage, bad search, with amazing resolution and archiving technologies, but might be made obsolete by E-books with lower resolution, but better search and way more storage capacity.
Reading:
We need to ask about the culture of reading in a world that becomes ever more textual, but feels more visual. We need to compare the immersive experience of a good book with the immersive experiences of virtual worlds.
Reference/Citation/Authority:
And we need ask about referencing and citations in a world where we expect to have the knowledge of the world at our finger tips.
Lots of fun questions for the network society that is emerging from our fingertips, as we are typing away at our laptops, all over the world.
[disclaimer: this text was written in a Viennese Cafe]
