The Morality of Reading in a Digitizing World
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THE MORALITY OF READING IN A DIGITIZING WORLD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DMSION OF THE UNNERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY MAY 2005 By Brian W. Richardson Dissertation Committee: James Tiles, Chairperson Rebecca Knuth Eliot Deutsch Graham Parkes Mary Tiles © Copyright 2005 by Brian William Richardson ill Abstract Everyone is surrounded by language, whether it comes from a voice, a printed page, a computer screen, or a host of other technologies and practices that all help create, store, disseminate, and present texts to people. Taken as a whole, this world of text, of language embedded in things, is a pervasive and profound part of human life. We use text to live, we live with text, and the quality of our lives, if not our very existence, depends on what texts exist, how they exist, and how everyone relates to them. Text allows people to do things, but are those things worth doing? We might be changed by text, but are those changes for the better? Questions like these lead the debate away from empirical concerns for effectiveness or choice to moral concerns for why one kind of life is better than another, and thus for why one organization of the textual world is preferable to others. While morality can focus on the value of a specific character trait or action, the fundamental moral question is the nature of freedom, meaning our ability to participate in the world in a conscious and effective way. Propaganda might create proper beliefs and good behaviour, but well-behaved slaves are still slaves, and they are little different from well-trained pets or well-oiled machines. The importance of freedom connects back to the challenges and opportunities created by the textual world. But the textual world is connected to everything else: to government, to the economy, to social expectations, and to IV the technologies that are available and effective at any given time. The morality of reading is not simply about reading well, it is about understanding and evaluating the conditions in which reading well and reading at all are possible, and therefore about the conditions in which we are able to improve our lives and ourselves. v Table of Contents Abstract . v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The Choice to Digitize 15 Morality ..... 23 Conformity or Freedom 29 Chapter 2: Ideals of Reading in 17th century England 34 Chaucer and the Exceptional Reader 35 Milton, Censorship and Character 42 Hobbes, Seduction and Absolute Sovereignty 53 Chapter 3: The Uses of Text ......... 70 Information and Skills 83 A Sense of Others 90 Narrative 107 Chapter 4: The Value of Textual Technologies 119 Persistence 122 Quantity 127 Quality 134 A Sense of the Textual World 147 Beyond the Printing Press 149 The World of Text 157 VI Chapter 5: The Challenge of Digitization . 166 Quality of Digital Text 179 Customization 182 Multimedia and Virtual Reality 184 Hypertext .... 194 A Sense of the Whole 204 Chapter 6: Institutional Organizations of Text. ... 208 A Room of One's Own 213 Institutions of Analog Text 220 Institutions of Digital Text 228 Censorship and Copyright 234 Chapter 7: Freedom, Character and Morality 245 Freedom and the World 247 Human Freedom 255 Freedom and Reading 267 Chapter 8: Conclusion 283 Bibliography .... 289 VII We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.... Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorism 129 V111 Chapter1 Introduction I am haunted by Walter Benjamin. His writings have appeared on my reading lists and my desks for many years. Fragments of his widely-reproduced essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" have been scattered through much of what I have read and even some of what I have written. I have even looked at some of his other works - but not enough, and not well enough. The English translation of Benjamin's Arcades Project, a monumental, partially destroyed, and unfinished work that arose from his physical and intellectual wanderings around Paris in the 1930s, was finally published in 1999. My copy, purchased soon after from an online bookstore, has sat on a shelf next to my computer ever since. I have writing to do, and The Arcades Project is not very high on the list of what I need to read. At least so far. I realise that the book is important, but there are so many other books and articles that are directly relevant to my topic - on the morality of reading in a digitizing age that unless an obvious imperative develops, it will be difficult to add yet another book to the list. Even if it is written by Walter Benjamin. But the book is not easy to ignore. Whether it is on my list right now or not, The Arcades Project remains on a nearby shelf, its thick spine always ready Chapter 1: Introduction #1 to be the object of a glance, or the unfocused background of a distant and somewhat vacant gaze. Like most of the other books on my shelves, The Arcades Project is waiting, patiently or otherwise, for me to finish writing, to tum off the computer, and to tum my attention elsewhere. My books are like bored ghosts, waiting to be seen. And if I am to be honest, many of them never will be. lt may be too easy to think of books in these terms, to think of them as pets, as companions, or as "vials of reason," as John Milton once suggested. Yet the books still stand on my shelves and their materiality - their various locations, shapes, sizes, ornaments, contents, and histories - all remain sources of anxiety, or at least of guilt, because they create a sense of what might be read, of what remains to be read, and of what should probably have been read already if only I had organized my time better. On the shelves, my books are objects of longing, a longing that is not simply a desire to hold the books themselves, but also a desire to exist in a specific way, to read the books in the quiet days of undistracted reflection. But I have a deadline, and that kind of reading is not very practical right now. Yet I remain someone who lives with books, literally surrounded by books, and that is why they haunt me. But such talk of haunting is not idiosyncratic. Nor is it untimely. We are all somehow haunted by books, pestered by the thought of them. People, at least certain people, are worried by a vision of the world where books will be gone or, what is probably worse, will be unwanted. Whether one speaks of the Chapter 1: Introduction #2 move from atoms to electrons, from the printing press to the internet, from analog to digital, or from reading to watching and surfing, changes in information technology have become key collective concerns. But how should we think about these changes? What should we plan to do and try to avoid? What can we hope for and attempt to accomplish in the face of a profound and possibly unstoppable change in the very foundations of our textual world? There are those who argue that the qualities of the book cannot be transferred to the electronic screen and that if we lose the printed book we will lose something of significant and irreplaceable value. The printed book is not simply a physical object, it is the basis of a reading community and, perhaps, the source of a particular kind of individual who has the capacity to think in ways that the computer can make harder or impossible. There are also those who celebrate the rise of digital technologies and the possibilities for human existence that are connected with newer ways of communicating, of storing information, and of creating text. Rather than dangers, some people see opportunities. For them, the computer not only solves some of the practical problems of printed books (such as limited access and high retail costs), it can also create fundamentally different forms of expression and understanding. In other words, not only can the computer replicate the world of printed texts more effectively, it can also create new kinds of text that are very difficult if not impossible on a printed page. Or at least that is the argument. Chapter 1: Introduction #3 Whether defeated or triumphant, with the increased capabilities of computers and their texts, the status of printed books as a medium of textuality has been brought into question. Does something different happen when people read electronic text rather than text printed on a page? What are the economic, social and personal implications for downloading an unformatted book from the internet rather than buying it from a bookstore or borrowing it from the library? If certain kinds of reading are so important, how should we try to use and direct computer technology in more valuable and effective ways? How, if at all, are the emerging reading technologies relevant to the role of reading in the cultivation of human character? It is not enough to simply describe different relationships with texts that are located in different media. There are projects to be imagined and values to be debated. What I know of Benjamin's writings can be of some help. Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," was first published in 1936.