The Death of Tom Sawyer

The Amazon Kindle2 has arrived, announces the world’s largest purveyor of books. Takes me back to my graduate school days, when MU would announce proudly to visitors at the new library that soon we will have “a library without books”. For years beyond recall, the Moose has taught us to think of technology only in terms of the immediate task accomplished: the car gets us there faster, so cars are better; the radio gets us news more efficiently, so radios are better; the light bulb provides endless, reliable, clear light at the flick of a finger, so electric lights are better. So if eBooks are more convenient and more pleasant to read than paper books, the eBook is better, right?

Enter Marshall McLuan and his famous dictum: "The medium is the message." That is to say, every technology has imbedded in it a new way of conceiving some part of the world. When the printing press arrived, the printed word itself ceased to be an object for the ear and became an object for the eye; similarly, our understanding of what a book is changed from a kind of communal product that can be corrected, interpolated, or plagiarized without any sense of dishonesty to a kind of private property of the original author, whose words cannot be used without acknowledgment.

Already, I think, computers and especially the Internet have begun to change our conceptions of what a text is and what a book is. McLuan maintained that in many ways such technologies are bringing us back towards a more oral and less printed culture.

It is interesting to speculate about what effect a successful "e-book" will have. Right away, I expect that the publishing industry will change, and with it our conception of the very act of writing a book; the book itself will not be the same thing for us. As books become more like our computer documents, the relationship between text and memory--already dramatically changed by the printing press, and by the computer after that--will move further in the direction of the atrophy of memory, because anything we want to know from our books can be searched. This in turn will likely further change our conception of what knowledge itself is--an idea that once was closely bound to memory but has been sliding more and more in the direction of "available information."

That much seems to me certain. More detailed theories are less certain, but more sensational and so make for better blog reading.

For example, the eBook will undoubtedly change the publishing business, making the publishing of a book almost cost free. Right now, the sheer cost of getting a book printed and distributed motivates publishers to insure that their books are of a high quality, and the publisher's requirements motivates authors to write at a high level if they intend to write a book. Take away the economic motivation, and now publishers can publish anyone, or perhaps individuals can even self-publish at the press of a button. This raises the possibility that the quality of books overall will decline towards the level of the blog; in fact, individual books will get shorter and shorter, since publishers no longer need a book of a certain length to justify the cost of publishing, and books look more and more like lengthy blog posts. Now everyone gets accustomed to reading books of this sort, and thinks of books as something like blog posts, and the idea of a book has changed. Finally, a generation raised with this new conception of "book" finds it difficult to read the Great Books, because they are trying to read Shakespeare like a blog. On top of that, our hypothetical readers have downloaded the entire Great Books set for free and it takes up zero room in their house, so they are immediately inclined to treat such a thing lightly.

I don't know that will happen, but it could. Here's another one, even less certain but perhaps eerier.

In any culture, when writing is first introduced there is a period when the written word itself is viewed as magical. This was true in the ancient world, but in the not-too-recent past, some third-world country citizens took to stealing shipping receipts because they thought the receipts themselves had a magical power to bring ships laden with wealth. But even after the aura of magic has worn off, and people do not write as many mystic runes as they used to, still the written word has a kind of authority about it because it eternalizes and disembodies the word: talk yourself blue in the face, that page just keeps repeating the same thing, and because no one in particular is saying it--it "is said"--the statements on the page have a strange kind of objectivity and hence authority about them. We have something of that instinct still today: people are more inclined to see things that are in print than things that are spoken.

But suppose we move to an eText world and people know, in the back of their minds, that the words in front of them are nothing but flickering lights. The text can change almost at the speed of thought, with the touch of a button; the one screen on which I read all my "books" itself serves as a reminder that the texts I see are passing illusions, and all supposed authoritativeness of the text is gone. With this changed instinct towards the text, people have more and more trouble experiencing a sacred text as sacred and authoritative; the eBible flickers and is gone like everything else.

Now, I don’t really know that my scenarios will play out. If an eBook becomes cheap enough for a college professor with a large family, then I will buy it. But some scenario or other will inevitably play out; the eBook will not leave us unchanged; a way of thinking about the book may well be passing away--as other ways of thinking about the book have passed away before.

Time only will tell whether the new way is better or worse, but the fact is the books we grew up with will no longer exist. Remember that no book exists until it has a reader: those blots of ink on wood pulp are only virtually a book. When the world no longer has a reader capable of thinking the book, the real book will have vanished; something called "Tom Sawyer" will still be marketed, and it may even be sold in print at special stores, but it will be unconsciously reconceived by the mind of the computer age. Historians will write learned articles about what it was like to live in a "paper culture," just as today they write books about what it was like to live in an "oral culture" or a “chirographic culture”. And we will be as foreign to our children as the ancients are to us.