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Vol.
III, Issue 2, July 14, 2004 |
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People and Books in the Same WorldBy Susan C. Hunnicutt, Student, Wayne State University Library and Information Science Program, schunnicut@aol.com.
One of the greatest paradoxes of books is how they can lead you away from people and toward them at the same time. Books can make the world disappear. But they can also make the world appear, and bring people closer together. This characteristic of books makes them tricky, mysterious, perhaps even miraculous things. It is possible that we don’t fully understand their power, or come close to appreciating all of their possible uses. Books have existed in the world as durable physical objects for only a few thousands of years. For millennia before the invention of writing, the power of the spoken word called forth the world and imbued it with transcendent meaning. Stories—for example the two stories about the creation of the world in the book of Genesis, or the story about the flood and the building of an ark—existed only when they were embodied in individuals. They lived by pneuma, what ancient people referred to as wind, spirit, or breath. Because stories could only exist when they were embodied in individuals, they were firmly rooted in particular communities and in particular relationships. Communities lived by their stories. When stories first came to be written down, and for many centuries afterward, it was understood that what was written was really meant to be voiced. Writing was closely linked to speaking, for which it was often considered a poor substitute. Words spoken in stories and later written down in texts flowed freely into conversations. The practice of reading stories aloud, even by solitary individuals, continued throughout the era of handwritten manuscripts and well into the age of the printing press. With the invention of the printing press, stories took wing almost literally. While they still had enormous power to give texture and meaning to the world of experience, reading became a more solitary, more silent pursuit. The shaping power of stories became more interior and more individual in its focus. This happened even as the widespread availability of books expanded personal horizons. In a library or in a kitchen, Augustine’s Confessions could be left on a table right next to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Books left on tables could be easily found and read, sometimes even by eight year olds. Although it might not be likely, it was at least possible that eight year olds might come to the supper table filled with questions generated in print-mediated conversation with a fourth century saint or a twentieth century British colonial storyteller. As physical objects in a world of voices, books lent durable reality and substance to fleeting words from distant times and places. They made their presence felt in the world. They made the world a smaller, more accessible place by extending the reach of personal voices across time and space, and giving them a tangible presence in the world. Digital technology changes the physical location and durability of words in the world. Because these changes in the ecology of language occur at a pre-verbal level, the matter is seldom put in precisely this way. But it is probably not a coincidence that in 1998, a little more than a decade after the introduction of Macintosh personal computers, and just as the Internet was beginning to take off, the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library launched the program, “What if All Seattle Read the Same Book?” which later came to be known simply as “Seattle Reads”. The program, which is dedicated to “celebrating the written word and encouraging an exchange of ideas,” (Seattle Public Library, 2004), has since been replicated in libraries throughout the country. While One Book programs are fashioned as celebrations of literacy, what they actually do is put books at the center of local conversations. They affirm the connection between language in books and life in particular communities, by making an intentional effort to gather a whole community around a carefully chosen story. Community reading programs are something of a shift for libraries, which have historically been oriented toward the needs of individual readers. Still, there are important reasons why this kind of programming is being embraced in many places, and why it is important at this time, as libraries adapt to meet the needs of a complex and rapidly changing world. Certainly, books provide an enjoyable way for people to be together. Gathering around stories is still the most basic human behavior. Because One Book programs aim for inclusivity, selection criteria often include, in addition to the availability of the author for conversation, the availability of the book in multiple languages and in alternative formats including books-on-tape and video/DVD. There is a growing appreciation of the human importance of conversation, and a growing recognition that by gathering around books, people in diverse, cosmopolitan communities can become wiser, deepening their understanding of the world and what it means to be human. What follows is a series of vignettes, somewhat loosely collected, about books, the future of libraries, and the uses of conversation. Why This Moment is Important – I.In October of 2003, Amazon.com announced a new feature, a database of 120,000 full textbooks located on its website. Using Amazon’s database it is possible to learn the title and author of a book even if all that is remembered is one stunning fragment of dialogue or descriptive prose, or the name of the protagonist. Its feature, Search Inside the Book, highlights multiple fictive and factual references to the Acoma Pueblo, which allows users to plan their vacation, or to locate Harry Houdini in his most recent book-bound contexts. Books, which up to now have been unsearchable, “a dark region in the universe of information” (Wolf, 2003), are now, at least in principle, as accessible as all the other data in the world. This accessibility is, of course, complicated by copyright issues. Publishers must agree to allow their books to become searchable. Exactly whether and why they will agree to this remains unclear. Still, in the weeks following the appearance of Search Inside the Book last fall, the popular press, and especially the press online, was filled with speculation that the end of the book as we know it may finally be at hand. Of particular interest to librarians, Tim Whitaker of Philadelphiaweekly.com imagined a scenario in which the Free Library of Philadelphia was transformed into what he calls a “gigantic digital workstation center”, staffed completely by technical support people. “No one’s saying the books should be set on fire or anything,” Whitaker wrote. “Let’s just get them the hell out of the way so the building can be put to some real use.” The plan would be accompanied by “some small unpleasantness,” as “librarians would get their walking papers” (2003). In response to suggestions like this (surely not entirely ingenuous), an Amazon.com vice president cited a nine percent increase in sales of searchable titles during the week following introduction of Search Inside the Book. “The program is 100% focused on selling more books,” he told Stephen Levy of Newsweek (2003). Levy, however, entitled his story about Amazon.com’s full text database Welcome to History 2.0. Reflecting on the implications for historians of a searchable full text database of all the books in the world, Levy wrote: “Thousands of library rats suddenly understood that forays that had once taken months to complete could now be dispatched in an evening. And many more projects that were previously unfeasible had suddenly been transformed to no-brainers” (2003). Whitaker, like Levy, was not convinced that Search Inside the Book is just about selling more books. “Once the Web has become a full-service digital archive of the whole wide written word, it’ll be a quick innovation or two before we’ll have the technology to order and bind books on our own home book-printing systems,” he surmised. “Libraries will become mini-museums, where old books are kept under glass, relics of the pre-“inside the book” revolutionary age” (2003). Technologically, though, there is nothing all that revolutionary about Amazon.com’s searchable database of books. Most of the documents in the world today are digital from the moment of their creation, and databases are everywhere. The Search Inside the Book database just points the way toward something else that can be done if people decide that it is useful. One writer for the online journal Slate, in the days following the appearance of Search Inside the Book characterized it as “the greatest literary time-waster since… the Guinness Brewery decided to commission an annual book of world records” (Noah, 2003). But another writer for the same journal expressed the view that this particular use of technology “will probably turn out to be one of those transformative Web moments when a tool suddenly appears and six months later you can’t imagine life without it” (Johnson, 2003). The discussion pushes librarians, and other people as well, to think more deeply not only about language, but also about the world in which we live and move and have our being. Are books simply “data”? Are libraries really nothing more than storage units for information? Or are they, at least potentially, matrices for conversation, community and perhaps even for wisdom? A Text to Search ForVaclav Havel, the playwright who became the president of the Czech Republic in the 1980s, once said this in a speech to the German Booksellers Association (Havel was the 1989 GBA Peace Prize recipient): “At the beginning of everything is the word. It is a miracle to which we owe the fact that we are human. But at the same time, it is a pitfall and a test, a snare and a trial.” He went on to suggest that free people are too casual with words and do not realize how important they are. “It is not hard to demonstrate that all the main threats confronting the world today…have hidden deep within them a single root cause: the imperceptible transformation of what was originally a humble message into an arrogant one,” he said. And finally, “…we should all fight together against arrogant words and keep a weather eye out for any insidious germs of arrogance in words that are seemingly humble… Responsibility for and towards words is a task which is intrinsically ethical.” I found this quotation in the New York Times Book Review in July of 1990, and have kept it close ever since. Last fall, I carried it around all semester, slipped inside the front cover of the binder where I kept my papers for a class, The History of the Book, taught by Barry Neavill of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science program. “At the beginning of everything is the word” did not turn up in a Google search, or in a search of Amazon.com’s new database. For a moment I was afraid that Havel had missed the boat on History 2.0. But the final phrase, “responsibility for and towards words is a task which is intrinsically ethical,” did come up as hit number seven of a Search Inside the Book conducted on November 26, 2003. As a result of this search, I learned that Havel is quoted on page three of a book in Amazon.com’s database entitled Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life. The author, Jean Bethke Elshtain, wants to talk about a kind of thinking that “separates the words we use from the realities they purport to describe…separating thought from its immediate contact with reality and crippling its capacity to intervene in that reality effectively…” (1997). Librarians, as they ponder the meaning of History 2.0 and the possibility that not only the book, but also their careers in public spaces, might be over, might, like the author of Real Politics, find it helpful to remember what Vaclav Havel had to say about the ethical dimensions of words and their care. Books and DiscourseOne of the greatest paradoxes to follow on the invention of the printing press was the way the medium, which pulled readers out of the enmeshed social world of “primary orality” (Ong, 1982, p. 6), and gave the “idiosyncratic individual” (Eisenstein, p. 58) a place to stand, at the same time contributed to the birth of a robust civil dialogue. The distancing effects of writing (Ong, 1982, p. 104-5) and silent reading (Eisenstein, p. 92), working in concert with the mass effects of the print medium, created multiple spaces of interior freedom in which strong and thoughtful personal voices were able to emerge. Because of reading, people became stronger as individuals. The result was that their relationships, and their sense of inhabiting a common world, were strengthened as well. At first, and for a long time, the voices tended to gather around ancient texts of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions and the Greco-Roman Empire. Eventually the oral milieu, in conversation with ancient voices but shaped by the progressive technologizing of words, was transformed. As a direct result of the print-mediated dialogue with ancient texts, new forms of social governance would emerge which valued both personal freedom and the gathered voices of individuals. "We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson would write—with a pen, in conversation with many supportive friends, three centuries after the invention of the printing press—“that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights” (Declaration of Independence, 1776). As illuminating as it is to understand the impact of printing on this evolving state of affairs, it is also important to understand that throughout the early modern period, the spoken word and conversation remained the dominant mode of communication. The three hundred years that passed between the invention of the printing press and the writing of the Declaration of Independence were marked throughout by the formation of strong communities of individuals, often gathered around books, but strongly committed as communities to the work of reform in many different spheres of life. Community Case Study #1: Martin Luther and the Protestant ReformationThe Ninety-Five Theses that Martin Luther posted on the door of the cathedral in Wittenburg in 1517 were written in Latin. They are credited with setting in motion the events of the Protestant Reformation, which over the next 100 years transformed the religious and political face of Europe. The printing press, which was still less than 75-years-old, played a key role in the story. According to the customs of the day the Ninety-Five Theses were offered for discussion, by a group of Luther’s clerical colleagues. But as Eisenstein tells the story, Luther “invited a… disputation and nobody had come to dispute” (p. 151). Students of theology sometimes get the impression that the very act of nailing the theses to the doors of the cathedral was an act of aggression. However, as Eisenstein points out, “church doors were the customary place for medieval publicity” (p. 151). Hammers and nails were not weapons but the obvious tools for the job. The publication of Luther’s theses in Latin meant that even though they were posted on the door of the cathedral, they were for all practical purposes posted in secret. At the same time, they were of enormous public import since the subject they addressed was the church’s teachings and practices concerning financial gifts and how those gifts were related to the conditions of the soul after death. It was as if Luther had gone to the center of the town square and shouted at the top of his lungs. Only he didn’t shout. He wrote in the privileged language of the church. Some people—ostensibly insiders—knew what the secret was. Others didn’t. It is not difficult to understand why his colleagues might have wished to avoid a public discussion of the issues he raised. Facial expressions, the tenor of the voice, the obvious choices of individuals either to speak or not to speak, all work together to make face-to-face conversation a powerful form of communication, both intimate and potentially dangerous (Ong 1967, pp.111-113). Someone, though, some isolated individual who did read and reflect privately on what Luther had written, saw value not only in the translation of the Ninety-five Theses into German, but also in their broad publication. As if by a stroke of magic, Luther found himself addressing the whole world. Months later he would defend himself in the presence of the Pope by claiming to be amazed that the text multiplied so quickly and evoked such a powerful response. As Eisenstein points out, there is no reason to believe he was not amazed. “The mystery… is primarily the result of skipping over the process whereby a message ostensibly directed at a few could be made accessible to the many. If we want to dispel it we should, instead of jumping directly from the church door to public clamor, move more cautiously… looking at the activities of printers, translators, and distributors who acted as agents of change… (pp. 52-3). In other words, instead of focusing on the reflective processes of a single isolated individual culminating in action, we need to see the process repeated many times and at many different locations by individuals who could easily be united not only around an ancient text and traditional stories, but also around the very contemporary issues Luther raised. Issues and ideas that were too hot to handle in face-to-face conversation, could, once they were committed to the cooler and more diffuse print medium, travel throughout Europe so swiftly, it was as if “the angels themselves had been their messengers and brought them before the eyes of all the people” (Eisenstein, p. 151). It is important though not to forget that what the Ninety-Five Theses ultimately did was get people talking to one another about something that was of intense and widespread interest: not just the intimate but understandably ambivalent group of Roman Catholic clerics to whom Luther had initially addressed his remarks. The Ninety-Five Theses in their printed form called forth the voices of safely distant and thus less ambivalent clerics, and eventually of a multitude of plainspoken villagers, farmers, and merchants. It was the articulate response of European people to what Luther wrote that constituted a historic event. The Protestant Reformation took place in a world still characterized by primary orality, and the significance of local voices. It is difficult to make sense of the impact of the printing press on the religious and political institutions of the late medieval period without attending to the densely oral, and intensely interpersonal milieu in which printed books and other printed materials first made their appearance. Community Case Study #2: Benjamin Franklin’s LibraryTwo hundred and fourteen years of printing, mass reading and personal reflection, writing, impassioned conversation, spiritual and political ferment separate the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses from the founding of the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 1731. After the founding of the library, another 45 years of printing and mass reading, personal reflection, writing, impassioned conversation, and spiritual and political ferment had yet to take place before the self-evident truths of human equality and divinely endowed individual rights took shape in Declaration of Independence. The founding of the first public library in America took place in the same social milieu in which the ideas of personal liberty and representative government were coming to fruition: it was a milieu richly interpenetrated by and attuned to powerful words both spoken and printed. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, who as a young man was a founding member of the Library Company of Philadelphia, had this to say about colonial libraries in general: They “…have made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges” (cited in Isaacson, 2003, p. 104). Franklin also noted the way the libraries had “…improved the general conversation of the Americans...” He attributed his own “usefulness as a citizen,” to a book written by Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister practicing in Boston during the time when Franklin was growing up (p. 26). Taken together, these quotations reveal a certain faith in the power of the printed word. Perhaps more important, though, is Franklin’s intense orientation toward the spoken word, civic dialogue, and community activism. Books, and the conversations they inspired, fed into the notion of a common life. This was expressed in the motto Franklin wrote for the library: Communiter Bona profundere Deum est (To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine). The quest for responsible freedom, as well as a certain civic piety, came together in the idea of the library as an American cultural institution (Issacson, p. 103). The Library Company actually grew out of a project of civic conversation—the Junto, or Leather Apron Club that Franklin founded in 1727, when he was 21 years old. Members would meet, first in a tavern, then in a rented house, to discuss current issues and events, debate philosophy, develop self-improving plans, and further their business and professional interests. “The enterprise was typical of Franklin, who seemed ever eager to organize clubs and associations for mutual benefit, and it was also typically American. As the nation developed a shop-keeping middle class, its people balanced their individualistic streaks with a propensity to form clubs…” (Issacson, p. 55). Isaacson describes Franklin as earnest and intentional about his self-assigned job of facilitating conversation. Around the time the Junto was organized, he published a newspaper article, “On Conversation,” in which he outlined several principles for the conduct of civic dialogue. The topic came up frequently in Franklin’s other writings as well. “One method… was to pursue topics through soft, Socratic queries… Discussions were to be conducted ‘without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.’ Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least feign) naïve curiosity.” He sincerely believed that knowledge “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue” (p. 56). The Library Company of Philadelphia was founded as a project of the Junto, to support its conversational endeavors. The first books it owned were books shared among members (p. 59). As Isaacson notes, Franklin’s sense of the ecology of books in the midst of a community of voices can be traced in equal parts to New England Puritanism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment (p. 24). The idea that “individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and wisdom that comes from conquering adversity” was a central theme of the literature and the history of the period. What made literature historical was that it found its way into conversation. Why This Moment is Important—II.In her book How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen tells how the old fears of librarians and educators —lack of literacy, interest and quality—have been augmented in recent years by the fear of microchips:
But Timothy Whitaker’s vision of a transformed Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia, cited at the beginning of this paper, is not a democratic vision at all. On a continuum from all-relationship to all-data, the language contained in Whitaker’s imaginary cybrary is far off the all-data end of the spectrum. The library he describes—it is important to notice that he doesn’t even call it a library anymore—is a library that has completely lost touch with the genesis of words in the life of a community. Whitaker, in fact, foresees the day when the library will cease to exist as a social space, since anyone with a computer will be able to publish books, and thus to become informed in the privacy of his or her own home. In fact, the real world context of Whitaker’s story about The Free Library of Philadelphia is a 50% loss of state funding, and the possibility that in a short period of time there will be no public support for the library project at all. In November of 2003, the easiest way to learn this was to visit the library’s website, where the following urgent appeal for support could be found:
Whitaker’s story about the Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia is not a story about the democratization of reading and equal access. It is a story about the dismantling of civic space. As long as librarians allow themselves to be defined solely as information professionals, and as long as they foster the vision of libraries as delivery vehicles for information, there is little to prevent the little box personal library from becoming the real prison house of language. Perhaps this was the real point of Whitaker’s article. For anyone who accessed the Philadelphiaweekly.com story online, it appeared to be nothing more than a somewhat cynical futuristic fantasy about Amazon.com’s new Search Inside the Book database. For anyone who did not live in Philadelphia, or otherwise know of the library’s financial struggles, the economic and political context was completely missing. The result is that a story that surely was meant to be understood ironically, against the background of a catastrophic loss, could instead be taken literally: Just another story about technology, in some twisted sense, a visionary story. The greatest argument in favor of books is that they exist as tangible objects in the world in which we live. The interface of sight and sound, where books are located, is concrete, physical, and proximate to the social world where people meet one another and where relationships are most significant, richest in meaning and value. If you hold a book in your hands, and enter into conversation with another person about what it says, and about how the words in the book relate to some event that is actually taking place in your shared social world, it is less likely that the words you use will be separated from the realities you are trying to describe, less likely that words can be stripped of their interpersonal and historic dimensions. Conversational space is still the place in life where growth in wisdom and understanding is most likely to occur. In a world that longs for peace, conversational space—space between persons—is the place where peace must finally be made. To effectively navigate the world in the age of information, people in general need a more all-encompassing map of the territory than that provided by the definition of librarianship as an information profession. What would happen if librarians began asking questions about the place of books in the ecology of human language? What would happen if librarians, struggling to understand the human meaning and value of physical spaces, found ways to get people talking about the ecology of words in the life of the world? ReferencesDeclaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson,
1776. ME 1:29, Eisenstein, E. L. (1983). The printing revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Elshtain, J. B. (1997). Real politics: At the center of everyday
life. Baltimore: Johns Farrell, T.J. (2000). Walter Ong’s contributions to cultural
studies. Cresskill, NJ: Free Library of Philadelphia (2003). Save our library! Retrieved May 2004 from http://www.library.phila.gov/excited/budget.htm. Isaacson, W. (2003). Benjamin Franklin: An American life. New
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