Five Televisions and Three Books
Two quotes from an article about a secondhand bookstore in Kansas City which is burning books in protest at the decline of the industry. The quotes are from the two owners of the store.
“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.
“There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books,” Leathem said.
Now is as good a time as ever to mention that subscriptions to Harper’s now include access to the entire history of the magazine in beautiful digital facsimile. This includes the interesting string of articles on the decline of literary culture starting with the despicable fame-craving pleas of Jonathan Franzen, continued by the avant-hipster cries for a worn-out experimentalism of Ben Marcus, and capped by the sublime classicism of Cynthia Ozick. Indeed, you might read the overblown pieces by the younger men in contrast to the measured wisdom of the older woman as exemplifying the very decline all pieces ostensibly address.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:52 am
I feel utterly meh about this. Books are an obsolete technology. I have no objection to bibliophilia, but the conclusions being made that books = culture = literacy are nonsense; the internet is increasingly the venue for reading, writing and culture. I only use books at all because copyright law is keeping so much material offline.
May 31st, 2007 at 12:45 am
“Books are obsolete technology” is a tired phrase. I do not see how my writing that “now is as good a time as ever to mention” between two otherwise disconnected paragraphs amounts to saying “books = culture = literacy”. Perhaps too much internet reading has blunted your ability to interpret anything that can’t be compressed into such an equation. As regards the tension between the internet and books, and starting with purely technical differences, I am fairly sure that I have yet to read anything on the internet that would be more than 100 pages in printed form. Have you? As regards the decline of what I called literary culture, and which the Harper’s articles address, this is not about print versus internet, but about serious intellectual engagement with literature by a culture versus superficial engangement with literature, or no engagement at all. This is orthogonal to print versus internet, at least insofar as those media are equally hospitable to the sorts of texts that drive literary culture (though I am not sure that they are, to put it mildly).
May 31st, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I should have been clearer that this equation was being imputed not to you but to the CNN ‘article’ you link – although I still don’t think I gave you any reason to jump to the conclusion that I was imputing it to you – charity in interpretation please!
I’ve been reading entire books worth of material from the internet as long as books worth of material has been being posted online. I accept that I am incredibly rare in this – I have yet to meet anyone who prefers online over printed content to the extent that I do, but I believe that this will change with the much-touted electronic paper etc.
I’m sorry if what I’m saying is so hackneyed, but I’m not aware of anyone else making the same point (although I haven’t looked) that I perennially make, namely that intellectual property law is the only thing keeping the publishing industry afloat, hence that the technology is obsolete, but survives due to active intervention by the powers that be. Without this intervention, we’d see rapid development of alternative text reading and home printing technologies, which is where the money now spent on books and publishing would go, IMO.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I certainly think you’re rare with regard to the length of works you’re willing to read online. I read a lot online, but nothing book-length. For me it’s less about the medium as such and more about all of the distractions I constantly have at hand when I am in front of the computer (constant emails and news items arriving for instance). This could all be managed within the computer environment of course, but I find it much easier to grab a book and walk down to the park. (And this besides all of the other benefits that brings).
Regarding the publishing industry, are you suggesting the complete removal of intellectual property law? I agree that the law is very poorly implemented at present, the most glaring example of which, at least here in the US, is the constantly expanding time-limit, which gets reset every time Disney’s images start to approach the border. But I don’t think the solution is the complete removal of a law governing intellectual property, because I don’t see how authors can make money without it. There is an asymmetry here between the music and book industries, I think, since I don’t think this problem is so acute with music. It’s easier to be a do-it-yourself musician selling your work to online fans (see this recent Times article for example) than it is to do the analogous thing with literature. I’m curious about how you think things would go for authors if you are indeed advocating the elimination of all intellectual property.
By the way, I should recommend, while I’m recommending Harper’s articles, a brilliant recent piece by Jonathan Lethem; it’s a completely plagiarised essay on plagiarism.
May 31st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
As a communist (kind of), my default position is to advocate the abolition of all forms of property laws, although I think that intellectual property laws are a particularly obvious case for abolition. Marx said (something along the lines of) one day people will find ownership of pieces of the earth as absurd as we today find ownership of people, one could certainly add to this the ownership of forms of words and code, which I think does look pretty absurd when you come down to it.
How things would go for authors? People would write when they had something to say and not when they didn’t. Authors worth a damn are not profit-motivated. Also musicians, etc. Indeed, the introduction of money typically has a deleterious effect on art.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:16 am
I don’t want your default position, I want your considered position. I agree that the profit-motive doesn’t produce good literature, and I am sure there are conceivable communist societies in which an author doesn’t need the protection of copyright to work full time at her art. What I am unclear about is how the abolition of copyright law right now could possibly be a non-disastrous thing for literature. How are the full-time writers feeding themselves, now that they can’t sell their work? I can see how it might go with music, where people will voluntarily donate money to an artist who produces work they like. I’m just not clear this sort of model could float with literature.
June 1st, 2007 at 1:55 am
Look, I think you’re right here – to advocate the abolition of all intellectual property laws while leaving the rest of society untouched has all kinds of problems, and so I don’t advocate that; rather, I’d just be ambivalent about it. Plenty of great writers don’t get paid and still write; writers who do get paid are often mediocre; many great writers, we can presume, don’t write what they might because they don’t get paid, which is all of our loss under the existing system. If no-one got paid for writing – some good writing and some mediocre writing would disappear, although I suspect the net result would be that the unappreciated toilers of avant-garde literature who can’t get paid would come more to the fore.
I think my original point was a Marxian point that the technological capacity of our society suggests a different form of socio-political organisation, and that the current organisation of society is a brake on our creative capacities.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:03 am
Interesting discussion, but what I find most disturbing about this issue is that the bookstores closing signal a larger, more depressing change than one technology being replaced by another. Bookstores are not closing down because people are starting to read books online. No one I know reads books online. They are closing because people are simply reading less, there is a decay in our literary culture. I don’t know for how long this has been going on, as I wasn’t able to read the Harper’s articles, but I’ve been noticing bookstores shutting down all around lately.
At the city where I go to college, there is a large mall. Last time I went there I found out their one bookstore closed down last year. Back home, the same thing happened to our mall – the one bookstore there was, waldenbooks, closed down. And I don’t live and study in the middle of nowhere, these are upstate NY and CT. Maybe these samples are not representative of the whole – but the article makes me think that they are.
I can see a scenario in which the ‘online book revolution’ will never come about not because of property laws, but because there will not be enough demand.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:18 pm
The British Board of Film Classification recently released their periodic report examining cultural attitudes towards video games, which they also provide legal age classification for,
“Although enthusiastic gamers may be more numerous amongst boys than girls, almost all children have some familiarity with games. It may be, as one professional proudly claims, that more children know how to play games than know how to read.
‘The last research the BBC did, the percentage of children between five and 10 who game, both boys and girls, is 100%. Game literacy is now higher than actual literacy at that age.’”
Whether we like it or not this trend is going to continue. Personally I think it’s just part of the natural change of media use. Literature has held prime place for a long time and has produced a profound effect upon the way we live our lives, some obviously laudable and others perhaps more insidious – control of the printing press lends the appearance of authority, which benefits the bourgeoise and particularly the corrupt bourgeoise.
All media have individual affordances and constraints, they all affect us in different ways. There is a hell of a lot of crap on the internet, but then who’s to say that creating a space for public discourse is such a bad thing? Perhaps after a while of all this jibber-jabber we as a culture will come to an equilibrium again where both literature and new media have their own space within the same ecosystem.
I enjoy reading books. That’s how I consume most of my academic work. I also enjoy reading websites, but that’s a different kind of food.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Bloody Wordpress (I assume).
It removed my nice formatting. I had included a link to the report, which I’ll repeat again here,
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/downloads/pub/Policy%20and%20Research/BBFC%20Video%20Games%20Report.pdf
-G
PS: Just for the record, that’s 107 pages… ;-)
PPS: I just realised there were more than two comments on this page. i.e., I didn’t realise Mark had raised Marxism and I wasn’t actually alluding to that when I talked about ‘the bourgeoise’. Personally I don’t dig Marxism that much but the shared language is useful for illustrating a point.
It’s great to read some interesting debate here. Ironic in a way. Perhaps we should rather write snail mail letters to each other, or publish papers on the subject in journals only read by a few obscure academics :-)
June 4th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
While I’ve conceded that very few people read books online (maybe some people are starting to read books on iPods though . . .), in response to I.C.’s point about literacy, I think that the shift towards online reading is away from the book as a form, but not away from reading per se. The internet is a medium that is still basically read and typed. The amount of time kids using MySpace and SMS spend on typing and reading is presumably higher than past generations of kids (since they have to do schoolwork too on top of this). Of course, this is changing – YouTube most clearly indicates the new, and in my view inevitable, trend away from writing back towards an oral/visual culture. Better computer technology, broadband and larger storage capacities mean that the internet will increasingly not pass through the relays of writing at all – and therefore information in general won’t pass that way. Video games moved away from writing a decade or more ago – text-based games have been resolutely replaced with games that look more like movies.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Thanks everyone for the interesting conversation. It has me thinking in a more multi-dimensional way about this than I ordinary do. (Ordinarily, that is, my thoughts don’t get much larger than a sigh at the kids playing games on their mobiles instead of reading books on the subway. I should mention as a counter to this that there is an incredible amount of people who read The New Yorker on the subway here). I gather there is a general feeling shared by our British commentators, Mark and Gareth, that the transition to post-textual culture is both inevitable and not to be lamented, while I. C. and yours truly feel there is something worrying about this trend (whether it is inevitable is something I am prepared to leave to one side for the moment).
One further thing to add about the decline of the local bookstore and the rise of the internet is the phenomenon of Amazon, of course. The internet has not only made many industries virtual, it has also enabled an incredible centralisation that has destroyed local business cultures of many different kinds. Books are just one example of this. So while one part of the decline of bookstores is due to less reading, another big part is the rise of Amazon and the other giant bookstores like Barnes and Noble. So we have both a centralisation of culture, and a centralisation of the economies driving (more optimistically, one might say enabling) culture.
I think this is lamentable on both counts. And I think the transition from longer-form to more internet-friendly texts is lamentable. And I think the idea of a post-textual culture is downright frightening. Let me say a few words about this. Before I do, I should point out that there was yet one more interesting Harper’s article (actually a sort of roundtable) recently, relevant to Gareth’s remarks about the rise of video games: “Grand theft education: Literacy in the age of video games”. (I needn’t mention that I think Harper’s is essential reading, but I should mention that I can send these articles to anyone who’s interested in reading them).
What can I say to articulate why I think all of the trends I mentioned are lamentable? I’m tempted to go straight for what I call in my dissertation the Louis Armstrong defense, after his famous reply to a question inviting him to define jazz—“Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know” (I put that in quotes, but a quick search turns up a million variants). It’s hard to know where to start. Some random thoughts of some values of long prose: the massive and detailed role of the imagination in interacting with long textual works (as an aside, this is also why avant garde music has always been better than mainstream music, but that is a rant for another time), the inherent suitability of text to building an argument, the way engaging with complex texts better enables us to communicate with one another, the brand of sheer aesthetic joy that can only be produced by an encyclopaedic novel (I’m nearing the end of Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot and so am carrying the feeling of aesthetic epiphany around with me day to day right now). I’m not even sure these are the central things to be said. But, as suitable for this medium, they were the first to come to my mind.
June 5th, 2007 at 1:30 am
I don’t think what we’re talking about is a “transition to a post-textual culture”, but the freer distribution of text online. I’m very much a text believer and think text will always be a more versatile medium than anything short of mind-meld for transmitting ideas.
I have to agree with Mark that the undermining of intellectual property is nothing to regret, and we’re only seeing the beginning as far as books are concerned. So few people make a living out of writing books. Surely no-one with a clue thinks writing books is likely to sustain them as a job, unless you treat it like a job and write books for the market like a freelancer, and even then you’re probably about as well-off as an office temp. Only a small and lucky minority will make a career writing what they want to write. I don’t think many writers are rational calculators who will stop writing just because they don’t make much money out of it.
As for local businesses… I can’t see what good lamenting them will do. Capitalism is constantly undermining small capital; the unusual thing here is the potential for decommodification. (At any rate for now a lot of secondhand shops are actually getting a new lease on life by sites like abebooks – because they now serve a market which can search worldwide for particular books, they can mark up prices in a way they never could when they had to aim at randoms walking into the store.)
August 18th, 2007 at 5:37 am
I just came across an interview Stephen Colbert did with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur,
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=91639&is_large=true
Keen argues that the internet is “destroying culture”, and goes into detail during a debate with Emily Bell from The Guardian,
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/take_two/2007/08/andrew_keen_v_emily_bell.html
I don’t think you’d necessarily agree with him, but he does talk about similar issues raised in our discussions here.
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/
August 18th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Interesting. Bell pretty clearly has the upper hand in her discussion with Keen, as he admits on his weblog. One thing I found curious was Keen’s distaste for Facebook and MySpace on the one hand, and his advocating ending internet anonymity as a solution to his problems on the other. MySpace and Facebook pretty clearly depend on lack of anonymity, so there must by something else he proposes to do to solve that particular problem. As far as I am concerned, while I don’t really full understand why MySpace is popular at all and have mixed feelings about Facebook, I think these should be thought of as like the malls of the internet, places where people screw around in ways that contribute nothing to the culture. I don’t see why they should abolished, though of course it would be worrying if they occurred at the expense of everything else—much as in the real world case. Actually that can’t be quite right, because in the real world case I think malls should in fact be abolished…