Adriaan van der Weel, Digital Text and the Gutenberg Heritage

Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective

In trying to fathom the significance of the digital revolution for textual transmission, whatever else we are doing, we are also trying to understand the future of the . Even the most passionate defender of the culture of the book will need to face the fact that digital forms of text are going to make huge inroads on the status of the book. Book historians have not been slow in recognising this. Beginning with such visionaries as Roger Chartier and Don McKenzie, book history has in recent years begun to take a wider view of itself. Since it has managed to break loose from the fetters of textual and adopted a new place within a history of ideas framework, book history is finding a new definition as the study of the history of textual transmission in society.1 When Don McKenzie proposed in the first of his Panizzi lectures in 1985 that it was necessary to “define ‘texts’ to include verbal, visual, oral and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography”2 this was still a radical suggestion. In fact, he probably hardly suspected in what literal sense these “text forms” would converge technologically, in the shape of digital bits . When McKenzie gave his lectures in the British in 1985 the World Wide Web did not yet exist, and the signs that such a powerful and widespread technological change was afoot were certainly not written large. But in the early twenty-first century there is indeed no escaping, to paraphrase McKenzie, the challenge which this broad new vista poses for book historians. To take up this challenge book historians can no longer maintain a narrow focus on recorded text in the shape of

1 {This is reflected by the recent and current emergence in many universities of “Book studies” programmes, an appellation designed to transcend the narrow categories of traditional book history (bibliography and palaeography), vocational book studies (, fine , etc.), new media studies, etc., and to unite them into a single interdisciplinary field of study.}

2 {D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (The Panizzi Lectures 1985), London, 1986, p. 5.} manuscripts or print, but must be prepared to evolve into textual historians.

A book historical perspective on the recent digital developments has much to recommend itself. It is almost impossible to begin to grasp the ubiquitous digital developments in all their ramifications and consequences fully on their own terms—the chief problem being that it isn’t at all clear what these terms are. In addition, we are confronted with an unprecedented convergence of “media” (text, image, sound) in bits and bytes, at the same time as we can observe a similar convergence of functions. In the same digital environment we consult library catalogues, do our shopping, make ticket reservations, apply for a new driver’s license, chat, email, read newspapers, and download music, and movie clips. In this whirlpool of developments a book historical perspective offers a coherent and familiar perspective. It may not have a ready explanation of every single phenomenon, but it offers analogies, comparisons, and a disciplinary rigidity that has been too much lacking in the discussion of the digital revolution.

A book historical perspective is a useful one also because book history as a discipline is centrally concerned with the dissemination of knowledge, which is also at the core of the digital revolution. Even those who impatiently shrug off the history of the book as a burdensome relic of a superseded technology cannot evade the continuity that runs from script through print to digital text. It is no coincidence, and very useful—often even necessary—that book terminology, together with the comparisons that it invites, remains pervasively present in all discussions of the digital revolution: from web pages to electronic publishing. It is as well then to embrace the historical perspective as an opportunity for an analysis of this terminology, in order to gain a better understanding both of what it is that we are replacing and of what it is that is replacing it. Indeed, an important reason for choosing a book historical vantage point is that in trying to asses the significance of the digital revolution it is precisely one of our problems that we remain firmly in the grip of our “typographic condition”. We involuntarily look at the new developments with typographically biased eyes. A book historical perspective can help us examine the familiar concepts (whether or not they are expressed in a familiar terminology) we stand in danger of using too glibly.

As at least one critic has remarked, transferring terminology from one arena to another of course also has its dangers: Many cognitive scientists accept the computer metaphor of mind so uncritically that it is inconceivable for them that mental life does not flow through buffers and circuits in an algorithmic embrace of the biological hardware.3 We should not reach for metaphors too easily when trying to describe especially things that we don’t quite understand. They might obscure deep-running differences. At the same time, some of the phenomena this book deals with are yet to be given a name by which we may begin to understand them. As long as we are aware that we are studying unfamiliar phenomena in terms of what is familiar we can probably avoid the worst pitfalls.

The advantages of adopting the book historical perspective as a unifying perspective probably outweigh the disadvantages. The book historical perspective allows analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the transmission cycle of texts, from their production via their distribution to their consumption. Stressing historical continuities and discontinuities can enlighten our perception of the new phenomena we are confronting. Conversely, of course, a study of the digital forms of textual transmission can throw an unexpected light on earlier technologies and offer unexpected insights in the history of the book.

1. The technologising of the word A particularly inspiring example of such a bidirectional approach is Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, of 1982. His primary investigation is of the gigantic shift in thinking that resulted from the arrival of the “technology” of writing in oral societies. In fact, he ranges much more widely, also examining the comparable major shift in textual transmision caused by the advent of print as a further instance of the “technologising of the word”. The “technologising of the word” is a particularly attractive concept when we are dealing with such a high-technology development as the electronic transmission of text.

3 {Andrew Dillon, “Myths, Misconceptions, and an Alternative Perspective on Information Usage and the Electronic Medium, in Hypertext and Cognition, ed. by Jean-François Rouet et al., Mahwah NJ, 1996, pp. 25-42, at p. 25.} Accepting Ong’s appraisal of writing as a technology,4 the “technologising of the word” has been a very long historical process. But in this process we may discern a very limited number of major shifts, involving the adoption of what Michael Heim has called “transformative technologies”.5 Elizabeth Eisenstein has persuasively argued6 that the invention of printing with movable type enabled a transformation of the worlds of science and religion of such magnitude that it ended up changing the very texture of society. If the effects of this transformative technology may be called revolutionary, this is a fortiori true of the transformative technology of writing. We may turn to Julian Jaynes7 and Eric Havelock8 for an intimation of the almost inconceivable impact of that first transformative technology, not just on science, philosophy, literature or religion; indeed, not only on the texture of society, but on the human mind itself. Compared to the transformative power of the technology of writing, that of the current digital transformation is likely to be more limited in scope. There are continuities between print and the digital transmission of text that there were not when writing was introduced. But what it might lack in transformative power it make sup for in revolutionary immediateness.

Certainly, each of these transformations in the way text is recorded has been radical enough to cause a certain amount of anxiety in circles concerned with literary production. From our contemporary point of view we may, naively, suppose the invention of writing to have been greeted with a sense of relief that the survival of literary compositions (and other writings) was no longer dependent on the defective memory of individuals. In reality, the technology was met with great distrust. Plato resented the incursion of writing into the

4 {Orality and Literacy, pp. 81-83.}

5 {In Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, New Haven & London, 1987, Chapter 2.}

6 {In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, CUP, 1979. Criticism#}

7 {The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Boston, 1977.}

8 {Preface to Plato, Cambridge, Mass, 1963.} realm of memory.9 Later, Juvenal worries about the short life cycle of papyrus rolls in his first Satire. Horace talks, jokingly, about the unaesthetic moths eating his . Moths were of course one of the major threats to the papyrus rolls of Greek and Roman antiquity, but the point is that it is paradoxically the (comparatively) new medium of alphabetic script that threatened the continued survival of their writings. The monument more durable than bronze that Horace has wrought—his poetry—is not really affected by such material hazards at all—as long, that is, as it is not written down but is carried in the hearts and minds of its readers.

Almost two centuries after the Gutenberg revolution John Donne was still preferring manuscript circulation of his writings to print (and not just in the case of the bawdy love poetry of his youth) because he shared Plato’s opinion of writing and regarded printing as a form of death:

Parturiunt madido quae nixu praela, recepta, Sed quae scripta manu, sunt veneranda magis ... Qui liber in pluteos, blattis cinerique relictos, Si modo sit praeli sanguine tinctus, abit; Accedat calarno scriptus, reverenter habetur, Involat et veterurn scrinia summa Patrum.

“What presses give birth to with sodden pangs is acceptable, but manuscripts are more venerated. A book dyed with the blood of the press departs to an open shelf where it is exposed to moths and ashes; but one written by the pen is held in reverence and flies to the privileged shelf reserved for the ancient fathers.”10

9 {This appears odd in view of Havelock’s argument that Plato barred poetry from his republic because of its tendency to perpetuate received notions about society and the world. He should have been more enthusiastic about a technology that was capable of objectivising the world of the mind. But this is the benefit of our hindsight: Plato was simply not in a position to see that capacity of the “reified word”.}

10 {Quoted from Harold Love in The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-century England, Amherst, 1993, p. 152-53, who uses H.J. C. Grierson’s text from The poems of John Donne (Oxford, 1912, i. 397), and gives his own translation.} “[T]he press, as woman, shares in the sin of Eve, bringing forth offspring in pain who are destined for death.”11 So almost two centuries after Gutenberg’s invention of printing with moveable type, the printing press is still regarded with suspicion, even hostility. Perhaps more surprisingly, Donne still holds reservations about the technological nature of writing similar to those of the classical authors. He wrote in a letter to the countess of Montgomery:

I know what dead carcasses things written are in respect of things spoken, but in things of this kind, that soul that inanimates them never departs from them.12 The idea that recording one’s words—in writing or in printÐsomehow makes them less alive runs as a red thread through all societies that are preponderantly oral.13 But printing also causes distress of an entirely new kind. Most acute, no doubt, was the perception of the press as an almost autonomous machine that, once set in motion, cannot be stopped. This was certainly Luther’s view when confronted with the unbridled dissemination of his 95 theses in print. But there was equally a great deal of apprehension about the way an author’s style and subject matter might be affected as a result of the mechanical nature of reproduction through the printing press.14 That the transformative technology of electronic text should provoke similar anxieties is not suprising. While writing is no less a technology than are printing or the digital transmission of text (as has been argued by Ong), the digital media are dependent on an unprecedented level of technological sophistication. Even if we leave aside the much more technologically demanding manner of their production, the consumption of digitally transmitted text not only requires an added set of skills over and above knowing the alphabet and being able to read. In addition, it requires an infrastructure of extremely sophisticated hardware. In a society without industrial resources and electricity, writing and printing are possible technologies. Pencils and printing blocks, or stencils, are low-level

11 {Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, p. 152.}

12 {Richard Wollman, “The ‘Press and the Fire’: Print and Manuscript Culture in Donne’s Circle”, SEL, 1993, pp. 85-97, on p. 90.}

13 {Ong makes the same point, citing further examples, in Orality and Literacy, p. 81.}

14 {Source?} technologies, and they need to be complemented only by . But the production of digital text, requiring for its production and consumption computers and electricity, is not a possible technology. Even in technologically advanced, heavily industrialised parts of the world the virtual nature of electronic text has caused a certain amount of anxiety. The medium is inscrutable in a physical sense. Electronic text to all intents and purposes does not exist when the means to read it (computer, screen, storage medium) are absent.

Another of the anxieties of the modern (electronic) situation may paradoxically prove to be that it has become rather too easy to be published. Placing a text on a website of one’s own making is a simple but effective way of making one’s work public in a manner which allows it to be read or consulted by others. But what it does not achieve is fame or immortality, or even the complacy that that work will remain available to generations of readers for the foreseeable future as would be the case had the book appeared in print and made its way into . No publisher has deemed the work worthy of being published: it has not been selected from among the untold numbers of texts that remain unpublished. In short, no immortality lies in store for the majority of web-“published” authors, because they are not distinguishing themselves among the anonymous millions.

And this anxiety about the anonimity and insignificance that is the fate of so much material published on the web is ultimately no different from the craving for immortality expressed by Horace, Juvenal or Donne. In both cases it is really death that is feared. Amid his great hopes for the internet Ted Nelson admits to his lurking fear that a text might become unlinked, and so effectively no longer exist:

Remember the analogy between text and water. Water flows freely, ice does not. The free-flowing, live documents on the network are subject to constant new use and linkage, and those new links continually become interactively available. Any detached copy someone keeps is frozen and dead, lacking access to the new linkage.15 But it isn’t just authors who have their misgivings about the electronic avalanche. In his unashamedly pessimistic but compelling The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age Sven Birkerts identifies language

15 {Ted Nelson, Literary Machines, 2/61, p. 48 [my emphasis].} erosion, flattening of historical perspectives, and the “waning of the private self” as some of the “developments we might watch for as our ‘proto-electronic’ era yelds to an all-electronic future”.16 It is easy to conceive of counter-arguments against most of Birkerts’ fears. However, amidst the gloom, some of his objections against the blithe optimism of the digital pundits make eminent sense. Birkerts is right, for example, to ask attention for the discrepancy between the binary bent of the computer and the essentially narrative nature of most humanistic research, as we will discuss in Chapter 9, Scholarly text processing.

Interestingly, such unease as Birkerts voices so eloquently is not very widespread. There are probably—at least on the surface—many more continuities from the world of print to the world of electronic textual transmission than there are discontinuities. More importantly, it’s early days yet. The often quoted remark about the power of the printing press, “ceci tuera cela” from Hugo’s Hunchback of the Notre Dame, is less likely as a prediction from a 1485 archdeacon than as a retrospective pronouncement from a nineteenth- century romantic author. And in the early twenty-first century we have not really had the time either to savour, let alone assess, the true transformative power of the new medium.

Whether we regard the extent to which electronic transmission is technologising the word as merely a matter of degree or as causing a paradigm shift, the digital media clearly represent one more transformative technology. We will do well to realise that we are not going to be immune to the transformations it is inevitably going to unleash. This book will examine a variety of ways in which this transformative power has already begun to manifest itself.

2. The order of the book The invention of writing, which more than any other invention in the history of the world to date has transformed man’s mind, society and its institutions, was an anonymous one. It occurred in many different places independently, the earliest probably dating back to the fourth millenium B.C. in the Middle East. In the art of printing, writing has, as it were, come into its own. Printing, at least in the Western world, we have come to associate firmly with the invention by Johannes Gutenberg of the practice of casting “movable” type in single letters. (Woodblock printing predates this invention by a century or so in the West; in

16 {Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, 1994, pp. 128-31.} the East woodblocks had been in use since the 6th century A.D. Moreover, the Chinese had invented the art of printing with movable type as early as the 11th century A.D.) If Johannes Gutenberg has been named “man of the millennium”, this is because he personifies what we may term, with reference to Roger Chartier’s L’ordre des livres of 1992, “the order of the book”. To talk of the order of the book reflects the chief way in which the dissemination of knowledge has taken place since, first the invention of the codex and, a fortiori, the invention of printing with movable type. The society in which we live is characterised by the fact that the book has been for two millennia the chief medium for the dissemination of knowledge. After Gutenberg’s invention the production of books was able to take off at an unprecedented rate, and printed books became a transformational presence in individual human lives and in society. It will be useful, before going on to examine the nature of the digital media, including the transformations, actual and potential, that may be associated with them, to look back at some instances of the way the printed word managed to transform and order society.

The close connection between the nature of the medium and the content of the messages it disseminates has been a recurrent themes since it was first turned into a catchphrase by Marshall McLuhan. We have become increasingly alive to the pervasive effects of the process of the dissemination of knowledge on the way we think, the way we organise our society, and it is these effects that are central to the order of the book. The nature of the medium not only dictates the form of the message, it also has a decisive impact on the contents of the message. “The book ... derives its specific efficacy not so much from being a text but rather as a node of physical, economic, and legal forces that differentiate and diffuse the effect of the text.17”The medium’s interface (which in the case of the book includes typography) through which we consume the information is a good case in point. It is clear that the interface is not just a transparent layer; it is—to a greater or lesser degree—part of the meaning. There is a long tradition of

17 {Patrick Bazin, “Toward Metareading”, in The Future of the Book, pp. 153-68, at p. 158. It is interesting to compare the intimacy of the perceived link between form and content in the case of the book with the almost complete absence of any such link in the case of, for example, music. No one would be overly worried about any difference in content—as distinct from quality—between an LP record, a cassette tape and a CD of the same recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This is perhaps the result of the fact that music is relentlessly linear, which excludes the sort of effect on meaning the mise-en-page can have in the case of a book.} regarding content and form as two sides of one medal: the content needing to be reflected in the form, and the form conferring authority on the content.18

The contentÐform nexus extends to the relationship between the nature of the information society and the dominant medium or media at any one time. The connection between the invention and spread of printing and such human achievements as the Reformation and the scientific revolution has been reiterated (by Eisenstein and others) sufficiently often not to have to repeat them here. But some of the ways in which the use of printed books effected the advancement of learning have been described in some detail, for instance by Walter Ong. In Orality and Literacy he asserts that what is distinctive of modern science—“the conjuncture of exact observation and exact verbalisation: exactly worded descriptions of carefully observed complex objects and processes”—has resulted in a “hypervisualised noetic world” that was simply unknown to ancient and medieval writers.19 Thus the descriptions of nature that we may find in the romantic poets would also not have been possible without the influence of print, which enabled exactly reproduced figures to be “reinforced by exactly worded descriptions”. But Ong’s most in-depth study of the effects of printing technology on the mind of man can be found in his Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Here Ong traces what he terms the visualÐspatial logic of modern philosophy to Ramus’ “corpuscular epistemology”20 or, as he has called it in Orality and Literacy, “logocentricsm”:

a one-to-one gross correspondence between concept, word and referent which never really got to the spoken word at all but took the printed text, not oral utterance, as the point of departure and the model for thought. (p. 168)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, technical developments in printing and papermaking caused momentous changes in Western society. For example,

18 {Michael Abrams (quoted in a SHARP-L posting) calls this the “body-soul duality” of the book form, which is of course especially prevalent in bibles and qurans [#look up]. (An electronic form might be as demeaning as, say, a one.)}

19 {Ong, p. 127.}

20 {Ref to source in Ong} the genre of popular mass fiction emerged to become vital to the publishing industry, as it still is today. In particular detective fiction and thrillers are examples of genres that thrive on the practice of extensive (many books few times) as opposed to intensive (few books many times) reading. These genres would hardly have been imaginable, let alone commercially viable, on any significant scale in a society which tended to read and reread a small number of texts for moral and educational purposes. How did this massive move from intensive to extensive reading take shape? A precondition for commercial viability was of course that books had to be capable of being produced sufficiently cheaply to enable people to obtain and read them for light entertainment. And indeed, far-reaching innovations in printing and papermaking together with the vast improvements in education—in turn to a large extent stimulated by the increasing presence of the printed word—took place shortly before detective fiction and thrillers became significant genres. But the significance of these developments is not just that they constituted a necessary precondition. In fact they stimulated, and even to a large extent created, the emergence of the phenomenon of extensive light reading. The introduction of the faster cylinder press, followed by the even faster rotary press meant a very heavy investment on the part of the printer. In order to secure a reasonable return on this investment, the printer was forced to utilise his presses’ full potential. Compared to the traditional hand press, this potential lay in fewer but longer print runs. Together with other factors, such as the availability of cheaper wood pulp paper this not only allowed a low price per copy, but actively promoted it. As a result, publishers were stimulated to cast around for forms of writing that could be successfully marketed to larger numbers of readers at lower prices.

But it was not the imperatives of technical developments in printing alone that spawned a whole new breed of authors and a new breed of reading matter. At the same time as the new cylinder and rotary preses were hungry for larger print runs, authors discovered the monetary value of their penmanship. Everywhere in the Western world the nineteenth century thus saw the rise of the author as a cultural and economic force. As at least some of the power shifted from the publisher to the author, and the international Copyright Convention was signed in Berne in 1886 the seed of our current notion of intellectual ownership was sown. But here again, we would not have intellectual ownership if developments in printing had not created the opportunity for authors to earn money with the fruits of their pens. Inventions and their implementation and development, including printing, are always caught up in a spiral movement with other societal changes, blurring cause and effect. [#return to this in the Digital Order] Many more examples of the interdependence between the role played by the media and the socio-economic conjuncture could be cited.21 But though the relationship is always a two-way one, social conditions swaying the development of the media as much as the other way around, clearly, the book has been a shaping force.

Indeed it is probably true to say that ultimately the all-important role played by mass entertainment in today’s society is, mutatis mutandis, still based on the same twin pillars of large-scale reproduction and intellectual ownership that were built for the print medium in the nineteenth century. Though the book, or rather printing, has since been joined by many more media in the course of the twentieth century, the book retains a powerful position. The way we organise our knowledge is still dictated by the book. Our society is still characterised by the fact that the book has been for two millennia the chief medium for the dissemination of knowledge.

A new medium always begins by imitating the old. From the first, books mechanically reproduced through the new art of printing were made to look as much as possible like manuscripts. featured, for example, rubrication, guide holes, blind-scribed guide lines in much the same way as their handwritten counterparts. There are very sound commercial and esthetic reasons for this.22 Similarly, there were no technical barriers to the production of smaller and cheaper books so that they might become available outside monasteries, churches and the homes of the rich. Yet the movement from the folio format to octavo as the norm for new books between 1600 and 1800 was very slow, illustrating the strong hold of convention. But now it is the turn of the printed book to be normative for the new medium that is beginning to challenge its supremacy.

21 {Darnton}

22 {Margaret Smith argues in her “The Design Relationship Between the Manuscript and the ” (in A Millennium of the Book, Winchester and New Castle Delaware, 1994, pp. 23-43) that “imitation” is a needlessly deprecating term. She does not, however, dispute the continuation in the hand press period of many of the existing scribal practices—for no better reason than that they exist.} Northrop Frye has called the book “the most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented”. In order to describe a world governed by the nature of this efficient “reading machine” I have borrowed the notion of an “order of the book” from Roger Chartier. In this birdseye historical view we have taken that notion beyond the literal sense of how books are organised and how we use them as physical objects. For the way books work and their nature as physical objects has implications for the matter contained in them. And so books and their contents contribute a great deal to how and what we are in the world. It is not difficult to imagine that, by analogy, the digital medium might be capable of stimulating different ways of thinking to those fostered by the order of the book.

3. The Digital Order

¥ Discuss characteristics eltext (copying, removal of need for sequential searching and linking, ...) separately from WWW, which, however, depends on these characteristics). Electronic text becomes a “transformative technology” only when computers get networked; it is not electronic text that constitutes the “third transformative technology” but electronic text distributed through the WWW].

“The Digital Order” is a misleading title in the sense that this book is not claiming that a new order has already supplanted that of the book. Rather, it is intended to express the vast potential of electronic text to work similar farreaching societal changes.It is the thesis of this book that through its application on the World Wide Web electronic text represents the next major transformative technology in the history of textual transmission after Gutenberg. This thesis will be tested by scrutinising the characteristics of electronic text and its application on the World Wide Web. But if we can agree that electronic text on the World Wide Web is such a transformative technology it must eventually lead to the establishment of a “digital order” comparable to the current “order of the book”. By examining examples of existing and projected uses to which this transformative technology has already been put or is likely to be put we can gain a sense of the extraordinary possibilities offered by electronic text on the World Wide Web to change the way we transmit knowledge, and ultimately of what we know and the way we know it.

The creation of the internet for the transmission of text represents a major breakthrough for the digital #element. But the internet has never ceased to spawn new developments in turn, proving a power of tremendous impact. Even though the internet era has only barely begun, both the speed and the scope of the changes involved can already be seen to be vast. The graphic WWW transformed the internet from a small twilit world of scholars and professionals ruled by a stern interface of textual menus and strict hierarchies into a universe of popular culture. Our understanding of the importance of text encoding and metadata has taken strides, and with it the explosive adoption of, for example, XML (eXtensible Markup Language—the sequel to HTML). The development of “web services” should lead to seamless interoperability of the most diverse internet services almost entirely independent of the software installed on the user’s PC. And so we are about to see a truly intelligent web emerge, filled with knowledge that “knows about itself”, as well as with the applications that will allow the human user to make intelligent use of it.

But speed of change is not enough to warrant talking of a transformative technology. Neither is the transferral of huge reservoirs of facts—and some of our knowledge about them—into digitally manipulable “data” capable of transforming society.23 So what is it about digital text in combination with the networked computer that makes it a transformative technology?

In order to try and assess the actualities and potentialities of digital text and their implications we should first scrutinise the characteristics, both of electronic text and of the internet and the World Wide Web. Then we should try and apprehend in what ways these characteristics would be capable of bringing about such a thing as a “Digital Order”. We might as well be clear now that the use of the term “Digital Order” does not of course mean that the end of the book is around the corner. Not often in the history of human communications has a new medium completely displaced an existing one. Print did not put an end to writing; radio and television did not put an end to books and reading. There is little cause to think that such a displacement is any more imminent in the case of the digital visavis the print media. Rather, the choice of media will simply increase and the nature of the content of the message will dictate the choice of

23 {#Bluntly, we might want to ask ourselves whether “the substance that computers traffic in, ‘information’ in the technical sense of the term, is the same sort of stuff that led to the Reformation and the French Revolution”. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age”, in The Future of the Book, pp. 103- 38, at p. 110.} medium for its dissemination. In this connection it will be useful to remind ourselves that the information universe does not exist only of digital documents. By far the majority of documents will remain analogue for a long time to come. But even then most new documents to be added to this store will be created from electronic sources, such as word processor documents, or processed by electronic means, such as electronic prepress. Among digital documents a distinction must be made between documents that were “born digital” and those that are digitisations or “surrogates”—digital copies of analogue documents. Similarly, in discussing the future of the book a distinction needs to be made between new texts, which are presumably going to be written in such a way as to take advantage of the new medium of the WWW, and existing texts, for which the codex might well remain the medium of choice because too much of their nature would be compromised by being published in (“subjected to”) a new medium. But whatever our prudence and reservations, we need to recognise that the role played by media and methods of communication is subject to change. Sooner or later, the book is bound to be elbowed out of its centre-stage position. But even if the time when the computer becomes the dominant medium in society may still be a while off, a “Digital Order” can already be observed to be establishing itself.

So what are the characteristics of electronic text and of its transmission on the World Wide Web? We have already observed that electronic text did not begin with the internet. But before the internet, word processing represented primarily a different method of producing text on paper. It was possibly a more efficient method than the use of pen and paper or a typewriter, but it did not offer a way to do entirely new things with text. Similarly, DeskTop Publishing or Electronic Pre-Press was a more convenient way to create the same conventional books, not a means to replace books by something new.

That it is not obvious to regard writing as a technology is a point Ong makes emphatically.24 Northrop Frye’s description of the book as a “technologically efficient machine” is so striking precisely because the metaphor yokes together such dissimilar worlds. But it is one of the distinctive characteristics of electronic text that it is the very incarnation of high technology. All electronic text consists of an intricate interplay of several “levels”. Minimally these are the physical carrier hardware (disk) and the virtual bytes that represent the text by encodying the textual form and content, but without the software and

24 {Orality and Literacy, pp. 81-83.} application software that allow the encoding/decoding of the bytes the text cannot be (re)constituted. By contrast, a conventional book is a single integrated piece of hardware. The fact that it was produced by a printing press is relevant for differentiating it from a manuscript book, but a printing press is not necessary for decoding its message. (Though a familiarity with the conventions of typographic form is, as we shall see in Chapter 3.)

The highly sophisticated technological nature of electronic text is a fact that comes with its own price. Typographic text, as we have seen, has reified words. Once printed, typographic texts are stable in multiple, (near) identical copies. Fixedness, linearity and boundedness are characteristics of the book that are thrown into sharp relief by the latest digital inventions. Digital text has no physical existence. Always residing in a virtual realm, it is unstable, in form, in content, and even in its very existence. In this sense, electronic text reinstates some of the characteristics of chirographic text: instability, fluidity, and the co- existence of multiple . Of course it comes with advantages too: the ease of making changes means that a digital text can be kept up to date without a great investment in time or money. But it does play havoc with our established notions about textual reliability resulting from long habituation to print.

In another sense, digital text on the internet has characteristics that were prevalent even longer ago, in orally transmitted text. As Eric Havelock has suggested, the dominance of the senses changed from oral/aural to visual at about Plato’s time.25 Writing in the middle of the twentieth century Marshall McLuhan observed a widespread return to an oral/aural method of communication, caused by the growth of the broadcast media.26 Allowing for its visual rather than oral nature, digital text shares many of the characteristics of this secondary orality: its immediacy, but also the fact that in a sense it is “broadcast”. The “signal” is derived from one central server, and it is the receiver who effectively takes care of the multiplication, by “tuning in” to the server to “receive” it. It may no longer be there only a short time later. But in its main thrust, digital text on the internet so far still perpetuates our visual culture. Words and still and moving images are far and away the most

25 {In Preface to Plato, Cambridge, Mass, 1963, p. vii.}

26 {e.g. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, 1962, p. 26. Ong has termed this a “secondary orality” (Orality and Literacy, pp. 135 ff.).} prevalent.

It is on the internet that the potential of digital text really comes into its own. Through the internet digital text can be distributed in a manner previously undreamt: instantaneously, to anywhere in the world where the web reaches, at extremely low cost, and ad libitum. It makes no difference to the cost of putting a web site up whether ten people visit or ten thousand, and whether these visitors live around the corner or two continents away. And after ten thousand people have visited it, it can be visited by another hundred thousand without exhausting the supply or diminishing the quality of the product on offer. Production is much less dependent on a careful prognosis of the potential number of buyers.

Importantly, electronic text also means an end to the division between written words, spoken words, music, still and moving pictures. All are created, stored and transported equally in digital bits. From the perspective of the written word, this means that it it is now fully open to being enriched with any or all of the other media. We are already beginning to witness the effects of the convergence of written text, spoken word, music and still and moving pictures. If digital “text” in the wider sense is still predominantly visual, the nature of this visuality is subtly but inexorably changing. There is a shift in relative importance away from the written word. Internet is becoming increasingly non- textual since the WWW, with its smilies in emails, icons in web page navigation, images and clipart in almost every electronic document. As digital video and stills camera’s and scanners are becoming standard gadgets in every household, we are likely to witness a further intensification of the visualisation of the media in the twenty-first century, although in a different sense from that which Ong describes as taking place in Plato’s time. Plato was witnessing the move from a primarily aural/oral method of communication to the visuality of writing: alphabetic writing, to be precise. As McLuhan and Ong have convincingly argued, there is a fundamental difference between alphabetic writing and other types of script. “Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from from the tribal to the civilised sphere, to give him an eye for an ear.”27 [#The problem of writing (Pöppel; Ong: As a technology, writing is artificial, unnatural, makes use of a tool—81-83) in a

27 {McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 27.} footnote or in the main text, depending on status of the research.]. Our century may see a return—even if gradual and only partial—from the “secondary visuality” of print to the “primary visuality” of images. With the changing ratios of our senses, our “sensorium”28 is once again set to change. With this shift in importance on the internet from secondary to primary visuality—even if its effects might be less farreaching than those of the secondary visuality of the first introduction of the alphabet—the human mindset is bound to be affected again, too.

Then there are the instant navigational jumps and the new non-linear ways of reading made possible by hypertext. We shall see later that the current implementation of hypertext on the World Wide Web hardly begins to tap into the potential of the technique. Nevertheless, even in its current guise it is amazing what hyperlinking can do to text, and what using hyperlinked text can do to readers. Hypertext is often characterised as being open-ended, non- authoritarian, non-linear and non-hierarchical, versus the linear, finite, fixed, closed, demarcated nature of printed text. It has been claimed, for example, that the immediacy and flexibility of electronic texts will promote a more active involvement in and a more intense reception of scholarly writings, whose “stern air of scientific closure may intimidate readers”.29 Chapter 4, Hypertext, will examine to what extent the claims made for hypertext are founded in reality and, more importantly, to what extent hypertext has delivered its promise. But clearly, at least potentially, hypertext offers readerÐwriter interaction of a new and different kind. And here we have already begun to touch on wider implications of the characteristics of the digital element.

The communication cycle of the book is often discussed in terms of a tripartite division into distinct production (including authorial), distribution and consumption processes and their interrelations. Transferring this division to the digital order helps to isolate some significant characteristics of the digital element. We have just seen that distribution is so much simplified in the digital context that it is no longer an issue. But production, too, is simplified, and largely for the same reason. There is no need for multiplication before

28 {#Ong?}

29 {Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Chicago and London, 1993, p. #. Lanham claims that “the codex book limits the wisdom of great books to students who are great readers” (p. #).} distribution can take place, and the complex production process that characterises the book can be reduced to the preparation of a computer file. Given some basic skills, such a file can be made on almost any home computer.

Some of the potential impact of this can be easily inferred. The entirely different nature of digital production and distribution, coupled with the completely democratised nature of distribution, dramatically changes the balance between production, distribution and consumption. The production/distribution-centred nature of the order of the book transforms to a greater centrality of the reader in the digital order. For example, as the investment needed to publish and disseminate a text on the Web becomes smaller, it will be considered to be recouped when a correspondingly smaller readership is reached. This is one key cause for the proliferation of material of marginal interest on the WWW—which may be termed “narrowcasting”. The occurrence of smaller readerships in turn is likely to reinforce the disintegration of the idea of an intellectual community or intellectual communities. The hypertextual quality of the Web, which offers as many different paths through information as there are “readers” also contributes to this. Frequently no body of material is identified as constituting a coherent whole. Even if “a website” is regarded as such a body of material, that body may be traversed in any order, and parts of it may be missed.

This “narrowcasting” adds to the frequently felt anxiety about the lack of a shared cultural heritage and shared social and moral values in today’s complex and heterogeneous societies. In the last few decades it has become increasingly difficult, for example, to identify a core reading list that might qualify one for membership of a particular intellectual community. The deluge of digital information on the internet—so much of it of marginal interest—only helps to fragment any remaining sense of homogeneity. One of the web’s main strengths—its extraordinary riches—may thus reflect as well as contribute to the individualisation—disintegration according to some—of twentieth-century human society.

However, narrowcasting can also be viewed in a more positive light. These user or interest communities are very different from regular social communities in the sense that they are usually very small, membership is geographically dispersed and membership of one community does not usually carry implications for membership of other communities. But they constitute communities nevertheless. The growing importance of user communities will be discussed further in Chapter 8, Electronic publishing.

The ability to tailor information to the reader/user is one of the most striking characteristics of the digital medium. Using a search engine on the internet already begins to illustrate this. Unlike in the case of a library made up of printed works, it is possible to ask questions of this huge collected fund of information. And the results may not themselves constitute the answer to the query, but they do provide, on the whole, useful pointers to the sources that will provide the answer. But the medium can do much more to serve an individual need for information. A scientist subscribing to a scholarly journal in his or her discipline, for example, is likely to find in that periodical much that is not directly relevant along with articles that answer a specific pre-existing information need. A subscription to the digital equivalent of such a scholarly journal could be tailored to the scholar’s interest profile, filtering any articles that do not match the profile.

The examples given so far are of existing digital resources that are waiting to be discovered. But there are two more dynamic ways in which a demand for information can be linked to the material that can supply that need. The first is the possibility of creating “intelligent information”, or information that knows what it is about, which is capable of matching itself with known interest profiles. The second is potentially the most exciting. This is the idea that digital documents may be constituted only in answer to a specific question. On a not particularly sophisticated level this is what happens when you key in a request for, let’s say, railway timetable information. The answer retrieves the relevant facts from a large database and combines them to form the required information. The difference between timetable information and ordinary internet pages is that the timetable database is made up of highly structured data that knows about itself. For example, a departure time will be in a database field defined as such, and so a computer processing the information 09.15 knows that it is a departure time. But take the following phrase occuring in a text page encoded in the WWW’s markup language HyperText Markup Language (HTML):

The train leaving Central Station at 9.15 is the last to get you there in time for the excursion.

It may be clear to an intelligent human being that 9.15 is a departure time, but it would take a great deal of programming to enable a computer to recognise it as such. But given a sufficient aggregation of sufficiently structured data in a given subject area one could imagine a database capable of dynamically generating web pages which answer a particular information need with great precision.

We have observed that the medium has a significant impact on the message. Just as the invention of the printed book caused authors to produce writings that may be printed for other people to read, this same “content follows form” phenomenon is bound to occur also in the case of electronic text. Indeed, my use of the term “Digital Order” springs from a conviction that the digital way of transmitting knowledge will have an impact on society at large. By creating new forms of communication the medium will allow, or even demand, new types of content: new sorts of information. It will allow new sorts of questions to be asked of the material in its new form, and lead to new research methods.

But much of this remains in the future. In the meantime, as always, even in periods of revolutionary change, continuity dominates. We are merely witnessing the beginning of the revolution—if it is to be a revolution. Despite the noise that it is generating, the new medium is really only in its infancy. Many of the changes heralded by the phenomenon of digital text transported by networked computers can already be observed in a more or less incipient form. But as was the case with other media, there are also many developments which will lie dormant for some time as unrealised potentialities, until the conditions are right. Many of the digital enthusiasts who extoll the virtues of the new technology manage in one breath to revile the clumsy, primitive, restrictive technology of the printed book to which it is compared. Indeed the shortcomings of books are painted so vividly that we can only marvel at the sad plight of so many benighted generations who have had to put up with them, and quiver at the masochism of the untold multitudes who voluntarily continue to resort to them even today. Often rehearsed problems with the book are: the unwarranted authority it confers on the author; its unbending linearity; its limitation in size (usually roughly 100 to 500-pages); its status as an autonomous unit, which impedes ready intercourse with other, similar autonomous units,30 etcetera. But in the face of the primitive state of digital textual transmission it seems rather perverse to talk about the fetters of the book. The computer screen—on which we are still dependent for our reading of digital text—remains a very unsatisfactory piece of technology, with its low resolution, its power needs (limiting the places

30 {Crane 1991, 295.} and circumstances where we can consult it), its restricted size (not allowing us an overview of where we are in a text, necessitating endless scrolling, and making it difficult to have more than two documents side by side). We still need to develop an intuitive “interface” to engage with digital text. It will take a lot of time to establish the same familiarity as we have with books, which enables us to recognise at a glance what a book has to say about itself: whether it is an authoritative handbook, a scholarly work or a work of popular fiction for ephemeral entertainment.

Even paper books as we know them today may not embody the absolute best that the medium has—potentially—to offer. Technological developments depend on a great deal more than just reader’s demands. Potentialities have often long remained just that because economic, political or technical hindrances have prevented them from being realised. Stereotyping, which was first invented in the eighteenth century, did not become economically feasible until the nineteenth; the computer, prefigured by Leibnitz in the eighteenth and Babbage in the nineteenth century, did not become viable until the twentieth. But whatever the state of their development, books do represent a very efficient technology. All things considered, we are still living in the order of the book, and books still have major strengths that electronic text have not yet managed to emulate—or managed to supplant in some other way.

Electronic forms of text offer very different potentialities from paper ones. These are not intrinsically superior or inferior to what paper can offer, nor will their digital nature make these potentialities necessarily more apt to be realised. The same economic, political or technical hindrances will continue to play their part. Media simply need time to develop to reach their potential. For electronic text it is very early days yet. Crucially—and here lies what is probably the greatest challenge that confronts us as users—the potential of the medium of electronic text depends for its realisation on what humans will demand from it. More than a thorough understanding of the nature of the electronic medium what we need for that is the sheer strength to lift ourselves out of the mire by our own hair like a true Baron von Muenchausen. Instead of allowing our vision to be dulled by our familiarity with the actual world in which we live, we need to imagine a more ideal one. Yet it is the world in which we live that feeds us the imperfections that inspire us. This represents our quandary: we need to articulate our digital demands unencumbered by our knowledge and understanding of the present, while we need at the same time to ensure continuity between the innovation resulting from our demands and our familiar heritage.

Never losing sight of the need for continuity, this book intends to study the nature of digital text and digital transmission in greater depth. Once we have done so, and have also examined present practices in digital transmission, we might find ourselves in a better position to formulate useful demands of the digital computer and its text processing potentialities. And then if we wish, we may also return, better equipped, to the question whether the promises made by the brave new digital world are really so glorious that we may consider the days of the book to be counted. There will be time enough to come to the conclusion that the digital revolution is finally allowing us to see the book for what it really has been for these last centuries: a straightjacket that our unfortunate and benighted forebears have allowed themselves to be locked up in.