The Future of the Book
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed.
Farewell to the Information Age
Geoffrey Nunberg
On the Role of Books in the Digital Revolution
"There will be a digital revolution, but the printed book will be an
important participant in it. And by the same token, there is no reason
to expect the digital library to replace the brick-and-mortar library,
even less so once we can make a physical replica of any book in the
collection of the Gregorian University and put it on the shelves of a
university library in Iowa or Lyon at the same time we make it available
over the Web in digital form. In all of this we are surely to be
seriously misled by analogies to technologies like movable type, which
established a private opposition between two kinds of artifacts. There
never was a technology less amenable to determinist arguments than this
one" (104-105).
On Electronic Publishing
"A signal virtue of electronic technologies is to remove the capital and
institutional impediments to the production and circulation of
documents. As we're often reminded, 'anyone' can produce a document and
make it accessible to thousands or millions of readers. And indeed, this
is exactly what anyone has been doing in increasing numbers. (You think of
what someone said about Greenwich Village in the 1950s, that it was home
to 50,000 people who had a great letter to the editor in them.) In a
certain sense, this could seem to be merely the continuation of a
tendency that has been in progress for a long time" (125).
On Private Pixels and Public Print
"Still, it is unfair to expect electronic media to be the agents of
sweeping social revolution or even for that matter of a complete
overturning of the present order of discourse. And from the literary
point of view, it is early days yet; really the appropriate comparison
here is not to the Tatler or the Spectator,
but to the seventeenth-century "news letters" and the like that
antedated these forms and made them possible. The chief difference is
that these new forms inhabit a public space that is already highly
developed and differentiated, so that like other technological
innovations (plastic furniture, for example), they will wind up assuming
certain specialized functions alongside the established informational
genres of print and their derivative electronic representations. This is
the only quibble that I have with Derrida's description of the Net as
being "in the process of transforming all the public and private
space of humanity." Rather, I think we should look to electronic
discourse to provide a counter and complement to the informational forms
of print -- a domain that privileges the personal, the private, and the
subjective against the impersonal, the public, and the objective" (133).
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