Wow, what an essay! Thanks for this thought-provoking piece, Michael. And congrats on the book--I can't wait to read it!
I'm a longtime reader but a first-time commenter. I'm an Information Science grad student who is studying how reading has changed in the digital age (particularly with the advent of algorithmic "reading" and "writing"), so I couldn't resist popping in with some thoughts and questions. I'm also a big fan of your work--Thank you for your invaluable ideas and inspiration!
I haven't read Illich yet (I know, shame on me. I just ordered "In the Vineyard of Text" though.), so I hope I'm not misinterpreting your reading of him. (Sorry if I am!) Illich's suggestion that the cultural shift often attributed to print technology actually began earlier with changes to manuscripts that, in turn, changed how readers read texts is fascinating. It also seems to be at odds with how Ong represents that cultural moment in "Orality and Literacy."
I just leafed through that section of his book and was struck by how Ong links the "oral-aural" nature of manuscript culture with memory: "Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts. Manuscripts were not easy to read [...] and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory [...] Moreover, readers commonly vocalized, read slowly aloud or sotto voce, even when reading alone, and this also helped fix matter in the memory." Ong continues: "well after printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the visible, printed text."
He argues oral cultures carry a strong "oral residue" (my favorite Ongism!) even after they transition to print, including reading aloud from printed texts instead of internalized reading, as if the act of reading were a speech event. I've often wondered how Ong's concept of "residue" relates to our current communications era. What practices have stuck with us from print and electronic media cultures? (For instance, the organization of digital information into "files"?Sidebar: I loved your thoughts about this in your "The Inescapable Town Square" article in "The New Atlantis." I even wrote a couple papers about "the posted word." :))
Ong talks more about the connection between our senses, language and thought, claiming writing “was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions. It is not a mere appendage to speech. Because it moves speech from the oral-aural to a new sensory world, that of vision, it transforms speech and thought as well." I wonder: Is a similar transformation happening now, as we (arguably) move from print to digital? Are we moving from text-visual to multi-sensory communications like video, which is both oral-aural and visual (and more fluid than static)? How might this relate to how we organize knowledge?
File folders are static, visual representations of a knowledge hierarchy. Files seem to me very much rooted in the culture of print (they are designed to hold printed papers), which (as you point out) is a static, visual medium organized around clear hierarchies like pages and chapters. Print is also a tangible medium which allows for books to be organized in externalized "memory palaces" like libraries. These are, in turn, organized around clear, hierarchical info management systems like Library of Congress subject headings.
In the opposing corner, we have the "hot mess" info slop bucket that is the contemporary internet. As a point of comparison, let's say a social media post (or "message") is the equivalent of a book in this brave new world and a social media platform, let's say Facebook, is the equivalent of a library (an archive where our externalized memories are stored and organized). How are Facebook posts organized? Who's organizing them? And, to return to your essay, how does that impact how humans conceptualize knowledge and understand our sense of self?
I don't have any answers to these questions. But I find it fascinating to think about them. I keep coming back to the idea of how our communications on social media are shaped by two opposing forces: externalized mnemonic devices we can see and control (like tags or chronological sorting functions) and "internalized" functions we can't see or control (like the black-box algorithm that decides what content pops up in Facebook's NewsFeed). (I'm using "internalized" to mean internal to the machine, not to us humans, which is strange and maybe telling!) I like to think about how social media offers us the illusion of controlling our communications (Personalize your feed!), but really so much of how our communications on are organized, stored and displayed on SM is actually dictated by those internalized forces that are invisible to us (algorithms, Facebook's profit motives).
The search function seems like a perfect example of that tension. Search functions offer us the promise of being able to find whatever we need whenever we need it, but in reality they filter the results we see based on a whole hidden schema of knowledge that has been selected and organized by others, including machines. This creates a kind of "epistemic inequality," as Shoshana Zuboff has called it, between human users and the machines/corporations we rely on for knowledge that has introduced a host of problems like the amplification of misinformation and racism. Safiya Noble and others have argued about the injustice and inhumanity of that system. What would a more humane digital information management system and/or ecosystem look like? Maybe more of the visible devices we can see/control and less of the sketchy, hidden puppet strings that control us? More like Wikipedia and less like Facebook?
One final thought/question blob about contemporary reading habits and environments: Michael, you ask: "What do we imagine we are doing when we are reading? How have our digital tools—the ubiquity of the search function, for example—changed the way we relate to the written word? Is there a relationship between our digital databases and the experience of the world as a hot mess? How has the digital environment transformed not only how we encounter the word, but our experience of the world itself?" I'm not kidding when I tell you, these are the questions that keep me up at night! It's nice to know I'm not the only person thinking about them :).
Recently I've been studying how algorithms and other AI that "read" and "write" (like chatbots and GPT-3) impact how humans read and write on social media, and I've asked myself a similar line of questions. This is the first time in human history that we are reading and writing alongside non-humans (some of which are invisible to us and some of which we believe to be human). Ong and others argued you can't have literacy without orality in the same way you can't run before you can walk. How does AI scramble this dynamic? Has AI like GPT-3 "decoupled" speech from writing (to borrow a term from Luciano Floridi)? What is "reading" or "writing" if a bot can do it? What does it mean for human readers (in both practical and philosophical terms) when we are reading and writing to and with nonhumans? What does that mean for our sense of selfhood?
Separate but related, what's the future of reading as a practice and a culture? I see a hazy connection between the rise of screen-based reading practices like skim reading and F-reading and the "hot mess" info bucket of the internet but I'm not sure I can illuminate the thread yet. Anyone else see it too? Maybe something to do with bopping around information/text instead of journeying through it? Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the rising popularity of social reading and writing (and their commercial counterparts, apps like Fable and Wattpad) and how they might relate to the idea of the internet as a collective consciousness. Is reading moving away from the individualism and interiority of the print era into a new kind of shared, external experience (like orality but coated with the residue of literacy, radio and TV)?
Anyway, this is too long already and the carpool line calls so I must go! I apologize if I'm treading familiar ground with any of this...that's a side effect of thinking out loud on the internet, an information environment that includes every idea ever! Thanks again for the rich garden of ideas you've planted here...and for letting us drop some seeds :).
I read Michael's newsletter yesterday and was spinning with thoughts -- and I return this morning to discover you've articulated many of them far better than I could! Thank you! :)
I'm especially intrigued by how THE BOOK once held near-magical significance as an object (which seems primitive and foolish from our perspective), and yet now that the information is divorced from the material, the unseen search algorithms and newsfeeds become our un-seen un-questioned all-powerful deciders-of-reality, and in this way we are re-performing that Medieval magical thinking.
To me the most important part of this is that the world DOES seem to be a "hot mess," but maybe we should wonder why we expect it to be otherwise? We are talking about networks that connect all of humanity across cultures, time zones, languages, and everything else -- if it DOESN'T appear to be a chaotic mess, that means that something or someone very powerful had intervened -- either with reality itself (a God!) or with our perceptions of reality (an algorithm, a filter, a falsehood).
Lastly, I think that the alternative to us experiencing the world's information as "organized" by categories (Dewey decimal system?) or systems (alphabet, numbering, file folders) or as hierarchies in a file system (sub-folders in sub-folders) is that we experience them as de-contextualized chunks "organized" (in our memories) only by our individual subjective experience of time (I saw this and then that and then this), and that we are granted the illusion of power when we type in our search terms, but we are nonetheless essentially passive recipients of decisions being made by others. A code-being is pulling things out of a bucket, slowly from its perspective to accommodate our pathetic 60-bit brains, while we twitch under the vague anxiety that we should be doing something else. Until a term leads to a new search or leads us to click on the link (the rabbit hole is also a bucket!) and really we're being played like a little Mario on a screen.
Thank you, Amy! Ditto for your comment here, which has illuminated new things for me!
I love the video game as a metaphor for the digital information experience, which can sometimes feel like you're being pulled along into a world without being able to see exactly where you're going. (Hello, doomscrolling!) You have some agency (you can choose to move your player), but you can't choose where she goes. That's all been predetermined for you by the game. And you can't see ahead to know what comes next. The game knows where you are going, but you don't. You can only choose to play or not to play. And if you play, you play by the game's rules.
To me, a book embodies a kind of opposite information experience. A book is a container of ideas--it seems finite and knowable. You can hold it in your hand and see the beginning, middle and end. Of course, much of a book's content is determined by choices made by its author and publishing team, but we readers can choose how to approach it. We can read the end first, skip sections, highlight, notate, doodle in the margins. And we can also look at the TOC and know what's coming our way (at least with nonfiction). The organizational structure of a book is accessible to us. That seems, to me, different from the unknowable sea of internet info.
Of course, as you sagely point out, this sense of agency and knowability that organized, closed systems like the book give us is false because the world actually is a hot mess, LOL! I wonder if there's a way to embrace that messiness without feeling constantly overwhelmed by it.
I'm intrigued by the book as a magical object, too! I recently took a book history/bibliography class called "Book as Material Object," where we learned to look at books (mostly early printed books) as historical objects. It was strange for a lit studies person like me to look at books as only bodies without considering their texts, but it made me reconnect with the physicality of books, which have a sort of spiritual significance in my life. Why do I have a house filled with books? Why do I have one with me where ever I go? They are objects of comfort to me, talismans of the mind. Maybe I'm not so different than a medieval monk after all!
My reward for this post are these wonderful comments! Thank you both. I'm traveling and not able to reply at length just now, but will definitely be thinking about these and I'll come back to them soon.
I usually try to write letters, but I just signed up as a subscriber, so, as an inveterate seeker of how things work, I thought I would leave a comment. I enjoyed the essay, and, as usual, I'll have to reread it a few times before I can gather all my thoughts about it. I've never managed the "hot mess" style of organization, but I think about it. After having worked here in the Dean's Office at St. John's College for ten years, the mere number of my Outlook folders have become its own hot mess, and at any given time, I have 100-400 email messages in my inbox. But the folders just are how I organize. As the Accreditation Liaison Officer, I have to pull up any number of documents related to accreditation, (both in email and on the hard drive). "How would I find those things by search term?" I wonder. My workstudy student, however, seems to have her own troubles. Yesterday she told me that she - and many of her friends - were not receiving any emails from the Dean's Office or any other college emails. "Are they going into your junk folder?" I asked her. "I think they're all going into 'other.'" "I'm not sure what you mean?" I responded. So she pulled out her phone, and she has the Outlook app on it, and she is only looking at the "focused" inbox. I simply didn't know how to respond. Why would she only look at what Outlook thinks is most important? I believe I disabled that feature as soon as it appears.
I feel like I'm lucky, and maybe I'm a little bit cut off from the mainstream, in working for, (and being an alumnus of), a Great Books school, organized around the reading and discussion of books. We still ban the use of Kindles in the classroom, because it is important for the discussion's flow for everyone to easily, and literally, be on the same page. Augustine and Aquinas are part of the required curriculum, so I do know, more or less what you are talking about when you refer to something Augustine says. (It's not just a Bob Dylan song to me, at the very least.) And we still file a great deal of things in file cabinets and send any important communications to the faculty or students through campus mail rather than email, on the supposition that physical mail is taken more seriously, (and we hear endless complaints about the state of email inboxes). I get the impression from some of your writing that we are moving further from the cultural norm in sticking to our traditional practices.
As I said in a letter I sent to you, I've been pursuing my own interest in Illich for years, and I find your newsletter invaluable to my own reading. I've been wondering quite a bit lately, to what degree Illich would have found the entire digital realm the worst of radical monopolies, but, as my high school computer teacher wrote me recently, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, though I try to every extent possible, in my personal life.
I feel a little odd leaving a reply to my own message, but I gave it a lot of thought last night. (One of the reasons I like letters is they are self-encapsulated messages you send off and forget about. Something about posting on a website draws me back to the website to see what has been happening with the discussion.) I was drawn to Illich's work largely through "Energy and Equity." I heard about the essay as a bicyclist. My activism has always been directed toward increasing bicycle infrastructure and bicycle safety education, and I have worked on city committees, etc. I'm fascinated by Illich's claim that we should look at creating societies that use the minimum feasible energy, rather than attempting to set caps on maximum energy expenditure. I'm very excited by that possibility, and it seems particularly prescient given the current state of climate change. However, on the flip side, I still don't understand the how of his argument. To my way of thinking, our culture cannot simply, "by a political process", move toward setting limits to the amount of energy a person can use. That feels like a large curtailment of freedom, but Illich states in the essay that "Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." While I make it a personal goal to reduce my energy use, (though not to a draconian extent), I cannot see any political process by which members of my city could come together and say we will only use so much electricity and no more. We will not drive motor vehicles unless there is a demonstrable need, and then, as illich would have, they will serve as subsidiary motors not to exceed 15 mph. That seems to me to be its own kind of dystopia, and I have not seen Illich argue convincingly that it can be achieved through "participatory democracy," (though it would be a much faster solution to our climate crisis).
I find Michael's posts fascinating, because they are focusing on communications, largely, and how the evolution of digital communication relates to what Illich has to say. It is also causing me to open my eyes a little bit more to the situation culture is currently in. I enjoyed the photograph of the Tandy Tape storage because I learned to code on one of those Tandy computers back in high school in 1983. I'm very logical-minded, and I found coding easy, and I was in the top of the class. My computer teacher thought I should pursue it as a career, and I imagine that I might be retired by now if I had gone into computer programming in 1983 as opposed to philosophy. But I felt that there was more inherent value in the question of what it means to be a human being than in how to perform calculations on a screen. I've had a odd career of being considered "a computer wizard" as one of my mentors and sometimes employer Charles Bell liked to put it. I like to figure things out, and I went through a period of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, but basically dumped all those things. I would find myself scrolling through Twitter or Facebook while I was standing in the kitchen waiting for water to boil. It felt dehumanizing. Finally, with the divisiveness on the Trump presidency, and its rampage through social media, I just dumped the whole thing and went back to bicycling and typing letters.
I've always thought of the digital world as icing on the cake of culture. It was sweet and entertaining, but nothing important or central to culture would be lost if the entire digital world evaporated, whether due to hackers or solar flares. We'd still be left with the basic cake, and it would be, by and large, healthier than the cake with the icing. I would go out on a limb and say that I feel Illich would make the same claim, though I have looked at his arguments through the lens of transportation more thoroughly than through the lens of culture and media.
What I've been gathering from Michael's essays is that it is not the case that digital media is the icing on the cake of culture, but it is becoming the cake itself more swiftly than I realized, as I sat in my house reading books and tapping on the typewriter. "My god, I find myself thinking, am I being tagged by the FBI for sending typed letters to the president asking him to consider Illich's arguments?" Have I drifted that far out of the mainstream without realizing it. I feel like my personal rejections of much of electronic communication have been well reasoned and logical enough that many, if not the majority, probably make the same conclusions. (Jim Merkel, in his book "Radical Simplicity" calculates that the environmental impact of sending a letter is less than that of sending an email. If an engineer comes to that conclusion, it's good enough for me.) Reading these essays makes me wonder if the imagined "many" that I feel I belong to does not exist in the quantity I would expect. I could sign back up for Facebook, but it feels a little useless to search for persons protesting digital media in that particular place.
I am absolutely delighted to find a fellow Illich enthusiast, and Michael's essays are top notch, and I look forward to the book. Many congratulations!!! However, it feels as if we are approaching Illich from different angles. If, indeed, digital media is no longer the icing, but has become the cake, the world itself is darker and more dystopian to me than I have imagined. I look forward to reading further and reconsidering my basic stance that digital tools for communication are, by and large, not convivial.
Thank you so much for your writing Michael. The subscription seems well worthwhile. I'll keep it going, but I may go back to letter writing from time to time, until I'm convinced that it is somehow not as convivial as posting online.
I meant to write this comment much earlier but here it is now.
I've been thinking it's so interesting that as the 'text' has replaced the 'book' and the 'image' has replaced the 'photo', an inversion of this pattern has also occurred: the 'recording' replacing the 'song'. I have no idea what a song is anymore. When Train sings "play that song" is he performing actually performing the Hoagy Carmichael classic "Heart and Soul"? We usually say no but I mean, it's the exact same melody. On the other hand when someone does a nontraditional cover track we say it's the same song as the original even though the only thing that's the same is the words and not the melody or types of instruments used or whatever. Despite all this, I feel like if you were to ask someone what makes one song one song and another song another song, they wouldn't be content to say, "Oh, it's just the lyrics."
Because we've lost the folk tradition and have professionalized music, instead of music being an act of performance, it's an act consuming content. Now we think that the fundamental packet or unit of music is the record and the concept of the song is strange.
Meant to reply earlier, but here it is now (sorry about that)! Yes, this is a good example. In fact, I think that Illich himself uses this distinction between song and recording at some point in In the Vineyard of the Text. This is one of these useful patterns that, once seen, can be helpfully re-applied in other circumstances.
Wow, what an essay! Thanks for this thought-provoking piece, Michael. And congrats on the book--I can't wait to read it!
I'm a longtime reader but a first-time commenter. I'm an Information Science grad student who is studying how reading has changed in the digital age (particularly with the advent of algorithmic "reading" and "writing"), so I couldn't resist popping in with some thoughts and questions. I'm also a big fan of your work--Thank you for your invaluable ideas and inspiration!
I haven't read Illich yet (I know, shame on me. I just ordered "In the Vineyard of Text" though.), so I hope I'm not misinterpreting your reading of him. (Sorry if I am!) Illich's suggestion that the cultural shift often attributed to print technology actually began earlier with changes to manuscripts that, in turn, changed how readers read texts is fascinating. It also seems to be at odds with how Ong represents that cultural moment in "Orality and Literacy."
I just leafed through that section of his book and was struck by how Ong links the "oral-aural" nature of manuscript culture with memory: "Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts. Manuscripts were not easy to read [...] and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory [...] Moreover, readers commonly vocalized, read slowly aloud or sotto voce, even when reading alone, and this also helped fix matter in the memory." Ong continues: "well after printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the visible, printed text."
He argues oral cultures carry a strong "oral residue" (my favorite Ongism!) even after they transition to print, including reading aloud from printed texts instead of internalized reading, as if the act of reading were a speech event. I've often wondered how Ong's concept of "residue" relates to our current communications era. What practices have stuck with us from print and electronic media cultures? (For instance, the organization of digital information into "files"?Sidebar: I loved your thoughts about this in your "The Inescapable Town Square" article in "The New Atlantis." I even wrote a couple papers about "the posted word." :))
Ong talks more about the connection between our senses, language and thought, claiming writing “was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions. It is not a mere appendage to speech. Because it moves speech from the oral-aural to a new sensory world, that of vision, it transforms speech and thought as well." I wonder: Is a similar transformation happening now, as we (arguably) move from print to digital? Are we moving from text-visual to multi-sensory communications like video, which is both oral-aural and visual (and more fluid than static)? How might this relate to how we organize knowledge?
File folders are static, visual representations of a knowledge hierarchy. Files seem to me very much rooted in the culture of print (they are designed to hold printed papers), which (as you point out) is a static, visual medium organized around clear hierarchies like pages and chapters. Print is also a tangible medium which allows for books to be organized in externalized "memory palaces" like libraries. These are, in turn, organized around clear, hierarchical info management systems like Library of Congress subject headings.
In the opposing corner, we have the "hot mess" info slop bucket that is the contemporary internet. As a point of comparison, let's say a social media post (or "message") is the equivalent of a book in this brave new world and a social media platform, let's say Facebook, is the equivalent of a library (an archive where our externalized memories are stored and organized). How are Facebook posts organized? Who's organizing them? And, to return to your essay, how does that impact how humans conceptualize knowledge and understand our sense of self?
I don't have any answers to these questions. But I find it fascinating to think about them. I keep coming back to the idea of how our communications on social media are shaped by two opposing forces: externalized mnemonic devices we can see and control (like tags or chronological sorting functions) and "internalized" functions we can't see or control (like the black-box algorithm that decides what content pops up in Facebook's NewsFeed). (I'm using "internalized" to mean internal to the machine, not to us humans, which is strange and maybe telling!) I like to think about how social media offers us the illusion of controlling our communications (Personalize your feed!), but really so much of how our communications on are organized, stored and displayed on SM is actually dictated by those internalized forces that are invisible to us (algorithms, Facebook's profit motives).
The search function seems like a perfect example of that tension. Search functions offer us the promise of being able to find whatever we need whenever we need it, but in reality they filter the results we see based on a whole hidden schema of knowledge that has been selected and organized by others, including machines. This creates a kind of "epistemic inequality," as Shoshana Zuboff has called it, between human users and the machines/corporations we rely on for knowledge that has introduced a host of problems like the amplification of misinformation and racism. Safiya Noble and others have argued about the injustice and inhumanity of that system. What would a more humane digital information management system and/or ecosystem look like? Maybe more of the visible devices we can see/control and less of the sketchy, hidden puppet strings that control us? More like Wikipedia and less like Facebook?
One final thought/question blob about contemporary reading habits and environments: Michael, you ask: "What do we imagine we are doing when we are reading? How have our digital tools—the ubiquity of the search function, for example—changed the way we relate to the written word? Is there a relationship between our digital databases and the experience of the world as a hot mess? How has the digital environment transformed not only how we encounter the word, but our experience of the world itself?" I'm not kidding when I tell you, these are the questions that keep me up at night! It's nice to know I'm not the only person thinking about them :).
Recently I've been studying how algorithms and other AI that "read" and "write" (like chatbots and GPT-3) impact how humans read and write on social media, and I've asked myself a similar line of questions. This is the first time in human history that we are reading and writing alongside non-humans (some of which are invisible to us and some of which we believe to be human). Ong and others argued you can't have literacy without orality in the same way you can't run before you can walk. How does AI scramble this dynamic? Has AI like GPT-3 "decoupled" speech from writing (to borrow a term from Luciano Floridi)? What is "reading" or "writing" if a bot can do it? What does it mean for human readers (in both practical and philosophical terms) when we are reading and writing to and with nonhumans? What does that mean for our sense of selfhood?
Separate but related, what's the future of reading as a practice and a culture? I see a hazy connection between the rise of screen-based reading practices like skim reading and F-reading and the "hot mess" info bucket of the internet but I'm not sure I can illuminate the thread yet. Anyone else see it too? Maybe something to do with bopping around information/text instead of journeying through it? Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the rising popularity of social reading and writing (and their commercial counterparts, apps like Fable and Wattpad) and how they might relate to the idea of the internet as a collective consciousness. Is reading moving away from the individualism and interiority of the print era into a new kind of shared, external experience (like orality but coated with the residue of literacy, radio and TV)?
Anyway, this is too long already and the carpool line calls so I must go! I apologize if I'm treading familiar ground with any of this...that's a side effect of thinking out loud on the internet, an information environment that includes every idea ever! Thanks again for the rich garden of ideas you've planted here...and for letting us drop some seeds :).
I read Michael's newsletter yesterday and was spinning with thoughts -- and I return this morning to discover you've articulated many of them far better than I could! Thank you! :)
I'm especially intrigued by how THE BOOK once held near-magical significance as an object (which seems primitive and foolish from our perspective), and yet now that the information is divorced from the material, the unseen search algorithms and newsfeeds become our un-seen un-questioned all-powerful deciders-of-reality, and in this way we are re-performing that Medieval magical thinking.
To me the most important part of this is that the world DOES seem to be a "hot mess," but maybe we should wonder why we expect it to be otherwise? We are talking about networks that connect all of humanity across cultures, time zones, languages, and everything else -- if it DOESN'T appear to be a chaotic mess, that means that something or someone very powerful had intervened -- either with reality itself (a God!) or with our perceptions of reality (an algorithm, a filter, a falsehood).
Lastly, I think that the alternative to us experiencing the world's information as "organized" by categories (Dewey decimal system?) or systems (alphabet, numbering, file folders) or as hierarchies in a file system (sub-folders in sub-folders) is that we experience them as de-contextualized chunks "organized" (in our memories) only by our individual subjective experience of time (I saw this and then that and then this), and that we are granted the illusion of power when we type in our search terms, but we are nonetheless essentially passive recipients of decisions being made by others. A code-being is pulling things out of a bucket, slowly from its perspective to accommodate our pathetic 60-bit brains, while we twitch under the vague anxiety that we should be doing something else. Until a term leads to a new search or leads us to click on the link (the rabbit hole is also a bucket!) and really we're being played like a little Mario on a screen.
Thank you, Amy! Ditto for your comment here, which has illuminated new things for me!
I love the video game as a metaphor for the digital information experience, which can sometimes feel like you're being pulled along into a world without being able to see exactly where you're going. (Hello, doomscrolling!) You have some agency (you can choose to move your player), but you can't choose where she goes. That's all been predetermined for you by the game. And you can't see ahead to know what comes next. The game knows where you are going, but you don't. You can only choose to play or not to play. And if you play, you play by the game's rules.
To me, a book embodies a kind of opposite information experience. A book is a container of ideas--it seems finite and knowable. You can hold it in your hand and see the beginning, middle and end. Of course, much of a book's content is determined by choices made by its author and publishing team, but we readers can choose how to approach it. We can read the end first, skip sections, highlight, notate, doodle in the margins. And we can also look at the TOC and know what's coming our way (at least with nonfiction). The organizational structure of a book is accessible to us. That seems, to me, different from the unknowable sea of internet info.
Of course, as you sagely point out, this sense of agency and knowability that organized, closed systems like the book give us is false because the world actually is a hot mess, LOL! I wonder if there's a way to embrace that messiness without feeling constantly overwhelmed by it.
I'm intrigued by the book as a magical object, too! I recently took a book history/bibliography class called "Book as Material Object," where we learned to look at books (mostly early printed books) as historical objects. It was strange for a lit studies person like me to look at books as only bodies without considering their texts, but it made me reconnect with the physicality of books, which have a sort of spiritual significance in my life. Why do I have a house filled with books? Why do I have one with me where ever I go? They are objects of comfort to me, talismans of the mind. Maybe I'm not so different than a medieval monk after all!
My reward for this post are these wonderful comments! Thank you both. I'm traveling and not able to reply at length just now, but will definitely be thinking about these and I'll come back to them soon.
This is a great comment. I’ve got nothing to add but it’s got me thinking, so thanks!
That's so kind :)--Thanks, Matt!
I usually try to write letters, but I just signed up as a subscriber, so, as an inveterate seeker of how things work, I thought I would leave a comment. I enjoyed the essay, and, as usual, I'll have to reread it a few times before I can gather all my thoughts about it. I've never managed the "hot mess" style of organization, but I think about it. After having worked here in the Dean's Office at St. John's College for ten years, the mere number of my Outlook folders have become its own hot mess, and at any given time, I have 100-400 email messages in my inbox. But the folders just are how I organize. As the Accreditation Liaison Officer, I have to pull up any number of documents related to accreditation, (both in email and on the hard drive). "How would I find those things by search term?" I wonder. My workstudy student, however, seems to have her own troubles. Yesterday she told me that she - and many of her friends - were not receiving any emails from the Dean's Office or any other college emails. "Are they going into your junk folder?" I asked her. "I think they're all going into 'other.'" "I'm not sure what you mean?" I responded. So she pulled out her phone, and she has the Outlook app on it, and she is only looking at the "focused" inbox. I simply didn't know how to respond. Why would she only look at what Outlook thinks is most important? I believe I disabled that feature as soon as it appears.
I feel like I'm lucky, and maybe I'm a little bit cut off from the mainstream, in working for, (and being an alumnus of), a Great Books school, organized around the reading and discussion of books. We still ban the use of Kindles in the classroom, because it is important for the discussion's flow for everyone to easily, and literally, be on the same page. Augustine and Aquinas are part of the required curriculum, so I do know, more or less what you are talking about when you refer to something Augustine says. (It's not just a Bob Dylan song to me, at the very least.) And we still file a great deal of things in file cabinets and send any important communications to the faculty or students through campus mail rather than email, on the supposition that physical mail is taken more seriously, (and we hear endless complaints about the state of email inboxes). I get the impression from some of your writing that we are moving further from the cultural norm in sticking to our traditional practices.
As I said in a letter I sent to you, I've been pursuing my own interest in Illich for years, and I find your newsletter invaluable to my own reading. I've been wondering quite a bit lately, to what degree Illich would have found the entire digital realm the worst of radical monopolies, but, as my high school computer teacher wrote me recently, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, though I try to every extent possible, in my personal life.
I feel a little odd leaving a reply to my own message, but I gave it a lot of thought last night. (One of the reasons I like letters is they are self-encapsulated messages you send off and forget about. Something about posting on a website draws me back to the website to see what has been happening with the discussion.) I was drawn to Illich's work largely through "Energy and Equity." I heard about the essay as a bicyclist. My activism has always been directed toward increasing bicycle infrastructure and bicycle safety education, and I have worked on city committees, etc. I'm fascinated by Illich's claim that we should look at creating societies that use the minimum feasible energy, rather than attempting to set caps on maximum energy expenditure. I'm very excited by that possibility, and it seems particularly prescient given the current state of climate change. However, on the flip side, I still don't understand the how of his argument. To my way of thinking, our culture cannot simply, "by a political process", move toward setting limits to the amount of energy a person can use. That feels like a large curtailment of freedom, but Illich states in the essay that "Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." While I make it a personal goal to reduce my energy use, (though not to a draconian extent), I cannot see any political process by which members of my city could come together and say we will only use so much electricity and no more. We will not drive motor vehicles unless there is a demonstrable need, and then, as illich would have, they will serve as subsidiary motors not to exceed 15 mph. That seems to me to be its own kind of dystopia, and I have not seen Illich argue convincingly that it can be achieved through "participatory democracy," (though it would be a much faster solution to our climate crisis).
I find Michael's posts fascinating, because they are focusing on communications, largely, and how the evolution of digital communication relates to what Illich has to say. It is also causing me to open my eyes a little bit more to the situation culture is currently in. I enjoyed the photograph of the Tandy Tape storage because I learned to code on one of those Tandy computers back in high school in 1983. I'm very logical-minded, and I found coding easy, and I was in the top of the class. My computer teacher thought I should pursue it as a career, and I imagine that I might be retired by now if I had gone into computer programming in 1983 as opposed to philosophy. But I felt that there was more inherent value in the question of what it means to be a human being than in how to perform calculations on a screen. I've had a odd career of being considered "a computer wizard" as one of my mentors and sometimes employer Charles Bell liked to put it. I like to figure things out, and I went through a period of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, but basically dumped all those things. I would find myself scrolling through Twitter or Facebook while I was standing in the kitchen waiting for water to boil. It felt dehumanizing. Finally, with the divisiveness on the Trump presidency, and its rampage through social media, I just dumped the whole thing and went back to bicycling and typing letters.
I've always thought of the digital world as icing on the cake of culture. It was sweet and entertaining, but nothing important or central to culture would be lost if the entire digital world evaporated, whether due to hackers or solar flares. We'd still be left with the basic cake, and it would be, by and large, healthier than the cake with the icing. I would go out on a limb and say that I feel Illich would make the same claim, though I have looked at his arguments through the lens of transportation more thoroughly than through the lens of culture and media.
What I've been gathering from Michael's essays is that it is not the case that digital media is the icing on the cake of culture, but it is becoming the cake itself more swiftly than I realized, as I sat in my house reading books and tapping on the typewriter. "My god, I find myself thinking, am I being tagged by the FBI for sending typed letters to the president asking him to consider Illich's arguments?" Have I drifted that far out of the mainstream without realizing it. I feel like my personal rejections of much of electronic communication have been well reasoned and logical enough that many, if not the majority, probably make the same conclusions. (Jim Merkel, in his book "Radical Simplicity" calculates that the environmental impact of sending a letter is less than that of sending an email. If an engineer comes to that conclusion, it's good enough for me.) Reading these essays makes me wonder if the imagined "many" that I feel I belong to does not exist in the quantity I would expect. I could sign back up for Facebook, but it feels a little useless to search for persons protesting digital media in that particular place.
I am absolutely delighted to find a fellow Illich enthusiast, and Michael's essays are top notch, and I look forward to the book. Many congratulations!!! However, it feels as if we are approaching Illich from different angles. If, indeed, digital media is no longer the icing, but has become the cake, the world itself is darker and more dystopian to me than I have imagined. I look forward to reading further and reconsidering my basic stance that digital tools for communication are, by and large, not convivial.
Thank you so much for your writing Michael. The subscription seems well worthwhile. I'll keep it going, but I may go back to letter writing from time to time, until I'm convinced that it is somehow not as convivial as posting online.
I meant to write this comment much earlier but here it is now.
I've been thinking it's so interesting that as the 'text' has replaced the 'book' and the 'image' has replaced the 'photo', an inversion of this pattern has also occurred: the 'recording' replacing the 'song'. I have no idea what a song is anymore. When Train sings "play that song" is he performing actually performing the Hoagy Carmichael classic "Heart and Soul"? We usually say no but I mean, it's the exact same melody. On the other hand when someone does a nontraditional cover track we say it's the same song as the original even though the only thing that's the same is the words and not the melody or types of instruments used or whatever. Despite all this, I feel like if you were to ask someone what makes one song one song and another song another song, they wouldn't be content to say, "Oh, it's just the lyrics."
Because we've lost the folk tradition and have professionalized music, instead of music being an act of performance, it's an act consuming content. Now we think that the fundamental packet or unit of music is the record and the concept of the song is strange.
Happy Halloween and Reformation Day, friends!
Meant to reply earlier, but here it is now (sorry about that)! Yes, this is a good example. In fact, I think that Illich himself uses this distinction between song and recording at some point in In the Vineyard of the Text. This is one of these useful patterns that, once seen, can be helpfully re-applied in other circumstances.