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To cap its twenty-fifth anniversary year, Duke Magazine organized a campus forum that explored what it means to create, transmit, and absorb the prime markers of civilization. The program, part of Homecoming Weekend in late September, grappled with ideas and controversies surrounding reading, including the central question of technology's impact on how, what, and why we read. The moderator was Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs.
The panelists were Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, an acclaimed book about the lure and cultural significance of reading; Andy Berndt '89, managing director of the Creative Lab at Google; Julie Tetel Andresen '72, associate professor of English at Duke and author of Linguistics Reimagined: Language Study for the 21st Century; Philip Bennett, former managing editor of The Washington Post and now Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of journalism at Duke; and Lynn Neary, who covers books and publishing for National Public Radio. Excerpts from the conversation follow.
Deborah Jakubs: I'm often asked about the future of books. I was on a committee a few years ago to help choose the first-year read—all incoming freshmen at Duke read a common book and then discuss it. Someone asked if it was okay if they listened to it as an audio book. The reactions ranged from "sure" to sheer horror.
As Kindles and other e-readers catch on, I'm starting to see a kind of polarization of the Kindles versus the non-Kindle people, and value judgments about books and about digital books are starting to surface. But books are not just vehicles for content. The books on our shelves are a kind of intellectual biography. They represent who we are, and I think I'm probably not the only one who, when invited to the home of someone for dinner, as I wander around, I kind of check out their bookshelves. And seeing what they have chosen to keep and have on their bookshelves gives me some sense of who that person is.
Reading is how we get our news, how we teach and learn. This topic raises questions of how we employ technology and further our intellectual pursuits. And it's all about how we communicate new ideas, scholarships, opinions, and discoveries.
Sven Birkerts: The last few decades have brought one disconcerting development after another. The alarms are familiar; I'll just summarize the main ones: That screens and reading machines will replace books. That databases will be our sole conduit to information and text. That newspapers and review media will fold and put all critical assessment into the hands of maverick bloggers.
I have a new angle of concern now: I'm thinking about libraries. A few weeks ago, Boston's Cushing Academy announced that the library would no longer acquire or center its services on books. It would convert, in effect, to an electronic learning center. This is big news not so much because of the one specific decision, but what it signifies, which is that the idea has not only arrived—we knew it was coming—but that it has worked clear through to institutional sanction. It illustrates a disposition, a kind of thinking that is sure to gain ground. Something recently unthinkable has become thinkable.
Much of my writing has focused on the differences between book and screen reading in terms of the individual. I've reflected on the psychological implications of connectivity, especially the subliminal impact: What happens when the text is pried loose from its context, its housing, and, as so often happens, is outfitted with links? How is the ancient author-reader circuit altered when the ersatz page, the screen, is part of a live system? Attention itself is redefined and, with that, the whole array of our cognitive priorities. Not just what we are looking at, but how we look at it, how we read and learn. And so what does it mean when a traditional print-and-paper library transforms itself into an electronic information center?
The written word is regarded as intellectual information—content—and the idea is that one vessel or means of transmission, the bound book, can be replaced by another, the screen and database. Further, there's the widespread certainty that the latter system accords better with how people access and use information in our digital era. Go into any high school or college library and see what the main activity is. Students are mainly sitting at terminals, clicking keys, scrolling.
The issue is that if the Cushing Academy model is widely adopted, we will not merely be substituting one delivery system for another. We will also, pardon the ready-made phrase here, be assenting to a paradigm shift.
The system of the printed book has always been premised on individual authorship, on systematized classification, and on cumulative progress along a timeline, at least where scholarship is concerned. The library has physically embodied this. Given that books were costly and scarce and that most individuals could only possess a very few, the library's purpose from the start has been centralized access. But, in serving that practical function, libraries also acquired a powerful symbolic status. As much as the university, they've been our culture's way of putting an institutional imprimatur on the life of the mind. But things have clearly changed.
The astonishing capacity of database technologies has already begun to short-circuit the centralized distribution function of libraries. Anyone with a laptop can access from home a good deal of what is otherwise housed between covers in stacks. If Google's search initiatives succeed as planned, the original prime purpose of the library will be all but eliminated in a decade or so. The laptop will be the new library. Physical stacks will have been eliminated by chip capacity and the refinement of search engines.
Books in libraries, books collected with deliberation, tended, arranged, present in physical mass, give a concrete picture of our collective relation to knowledge. That a book exists in a library means something: It has earned its way into print through a prescribed process and was deemed worthy according to the selection criteria of the library—a double gate-keeping process. Books assembled on shelves in classified order testify to the breadth of a subject area and visually enforce the understanding that knowledge is cumulative. Classification itself references a consensual understanding about scholarly interrelation. Taken together, these realities project the material importance, the outward reality of scholarship, of what might be called the structure of knowledge.
Think of the student who has more or less grown up in our electronic culture, who already uses books differently, far more sparingly than those in the generation ahead of her did. Imagine this student placed now in an environment stripped of books, which offers only the power of the technology and the near infinity of data within keystroke reach. Where does she find her primary idea of context, of the principles of relatedness? What paradigm of knowledge does she hold, and by what sanction does she hold it? On a screen, where all data are created seemingly equal, where does she get her idea of authority? What is her developing picture of knowledge and its many branches?
The physical book represents, among other things, the idea of authorship, with all the implications of individual authority contained in that word. The wholesale transposition of books to screens and databases would make of knowledge a vast referential weave—obviously, a far more collective enterprise. Where there is so much information webbed and linked, we can expect, and we are already seeing, the emergence of the Wikipedia model: collective correction and adjustment and augmentation—the hiving of information.
In the process, we are rewriting the literal and conceptual relation of self to society. I can't start to theorize what this implies about power, control. The debate over Google [book] scanning, over copyright—these are early conspicuous instances of the shift. The individual navigating the system will inevitably cede more and more initiative to that system, trusting the rank and recurrence of linkages over the testimony itself, forgetting in the process that the system embodies only the authority of the collectivity, nothing else.
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