10: Beyond the Book

Table of contents

1. Introduction
   1. Reading as a latent ambiguity
   2. Reading Before Print
   3. Reading After Print
   4. Comparable examples in writing
2. Unit Overview
3. Introduction to Today’s Reading
4. As We May Think
5. Literary Machines
   1. Concern 1: spoils the unity and structure of interconnection
   2. Concern 2: single sequences are not always appropriate for everyone.
6. Nelson v Allen 1979 Interview
7. A Concern: Limiting Metaphors

Important: please make sure to listen to at least the first half of the interview with Nelson embedded below (up to the 11 minute, 18 second mark). I’m eager to discuss it with you tomorrow.

Introduction

At this point we are going to shift our attention from the general discourse about information to some of its implications.

In this unit, I want focus specifically on the impact that the informational turn has had on the activities of reading and writing.

In our next unit, we will look at the social consequences of the informational turn.

Before diving into our reading I want to identify some of the general questions that can animate our discussion.

Then, as we turn to our first readings for this unit, I want to look at some of the early pioneers of networked communication. Here our goal is to see some of the early criticism of the medium of the book and observe what might possible when information becomes machine actionable and automatically transferable from one lower level medium to another.

Reading as a latent ambiguity

To start let me introduce a concept that will re-occur in our reading later. This idea is the notion of “Latent Ambiguity” as introduce by Lawrence Lessig in his book “Code”. For now it is enough to summarize.

The point is that there are many possibilities whose value/worth remains undecided or ambiguous because the inherent limitations of existing media make these theoretical possibilities impossible for us. When something is not possible for us, we rarely ask if we should or should not do it. In fact, when something is not possible for us, it is often hard for us to even see that it actually is a possibility, and accordingly it is even harder for us to to consider whether such a thing should be valued and protected or should be considered a danger that should be forbidden.

But as technology changes, new theoretical possibilities become actual possibilities for us. This forces us in the present to confront trade-offs; a weighing of pros and cons that previous human beings never before had to make. Such hidden possibilities are “latent ambiguities” that new technology forces us to face for the first time.

I want to think about this concept as we consider the seemingly familiar notions of “reading” and “writing”

Do we know what it means to “read”?

We use the term often as if means something specific, but if we inspect it close enough, we can see that the word “reading” means many different things.

Obviously, we read books.

But don’t we also read maps? Is this the same activity or a different activity?

We read the stars. We read signs. We read people.

Even here it seems like, in addition to regular “reading”, I could “skim” read. And both of these activity of reading are enabled or hindered through the design of the human interface.

For example: imagine a book that only allowed you to read “sentence by sentence”. This would be a medium (or a “user interface”) that would make “skim reading” very difficult.

Reading Before Print

It might be helpful for us to remind ourselves about reading before the modern era.

Obviously some people read, but as we have previously discussed, the notion of silent reason was practically unknown. The goal of reading for much of literate history was to read aloud so that others could hear it.

So now, imagine that a machine comes a long which can “recite” the text allowed. Now, no one needs to read, because the “end goal” of reading has been achieved by other means.

This is a good example of a “latent ambiguity” because in a world where “reading a text” out loud was the only way for it to be recited, it was taken for granted (or the question was never considered) that the ability “to read” was itself important. The recitation was seen as the goal, and someone knowing how to read was an obvious necessary means of achieving this goal. But when the machine appears, able to take care of the reciting function, people were forced to ask for the first time: is it it important that we continue to cultivate this ability to “read”? Should we spend many of our precious hours here on earth learning to read? Is it worth it?

Reading After Print

We might extend this example to think about some of the real world technological changes you and I are living through.

If today, we read in order to obtain information, and now that information can be more quickly or effectively communicated through a picture or a video, is it a problem if people are reading less or losing certain kinds of reading skills altogether?

A comparable example might be the ability to remember phone numbers. In the days before the cell phone, people usually cultivated strong memories for preserving telephone numbers. Today, few of us “know” a phone number by heart. This could be conceived as a loss, but is this bad? Is it important that we retain the ability memorize phone numbers? Before the cell phone, we never really had to ask this question because we just “had to” memorize phone numbers. It is only now that we no longer “have to” that we are confronted with the question “should we”?

Comparable examples in writing

We could ask similar questions about writing.

If the goal of writing is to communicate, let’s say the events of a baseball game. If a program or AI bot can effectively compose this sports report, this will mean that human beings will write less and eventually cease to write post games reports. Note that this is not the future, but the present: See The Associated Press is using AI to write Minor League Baseball articles or consider this-news-writing-bot-is-now-free-for-everyone

The possibility of communicating via written text without ever writing was not something previously imagined, thus we never really had to take a stand on the value of the pure writing act because it was deemed necessary to the goal of communication whether we valued it or not. But if human writing is no longer necessary for written communication, it forces upon us the question of value with new urgency. It is, in a word, a “Latent ambiguity”.

Unit Overview

In the next 5 or so class we will explore various people writing on topics that relate to these questions.

We will begin in 20th century with practitioners and philosophers that express frustration with the limitations placed on the experience of reading by the printed medium. Here our interest is in new horizons that might be opened when information is communicated in different forms or how the experience of reading might be enriched through the expansion or revaluation of the “best kind of reading”.

We will look at this…

1. from the prospective of computer scientists and visionaries of the coming internet (e.g. Bush and Nelson).
2. from literary studies and the potentials of “hypertextual reading” (Landow, Barthes, Foucault).
3. from the idea of distant reading and distant writing (Moretti, et al.).

Once we have seen some of these new possibilities, we will (hopefully) have laid bare the relevant “latent ambiguities”.

Then I want to look at some critics of new media: voices that want to defend the idea that there is something extremely valuable about the act of sustained silent deep reading, and that as a value it must be defended, when previously it did not need a defense because it was technologically demanded.

Introduction to Today’s Reading

With today’s reading we want to consider two thinkers that helped pioneer the idea of networked reading. These thinkers were able to raise themselves above the immediate “ruling ideas” of the dominant medium and raise critiques about its limitations. They were secondly able to imagine how the digital medium might enable new forms of reading and writing that would overcome these limitations.

As We May Think

In general, what concerns does Bush raise about current research environments?

What are the so-called “repetitive thoughts” we encounter that Bush would like to outsourced (see pp. 9-10) .

Note 1: It is worth noting the language that Bush uses of “freeing the brain” and “relief…from laborious detailed manipulation” (See ) and the general distinction between creative and repetitive tasks, stands in fairly stark contrast to Socrates’ concern about writing as a way of out-sourcing memory.

For example he says:

“Whenever logical processes of thought are employed–that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove–there is an opportunity for the machine.”

Bush sees this outsourcing (what McLuhan calls the “extensions of man”) as a way to free the brain for “creative cognitive acts” in contradistinction from “repetitive tasks”, perhaps precisely the routine or repetition that was so highly valued by a purely oral culture.

Note 2: Here we should also keep in mind that the new way of thinking about texts is possible for Bush because he is able to perform precisely the kind of abstraction Shannon pushes us towards. (Bush was Shannon’s teacher at MIT after all, and they were very much breathing the same intellectual air). While most of us may think of a text as something with a physical appearance, Bush want us to see it as “visually encoded” information: as such, if this information could be re-encoded in other types of matter it could be subject to automatic manipulation.

In this respect, we can see him complaining of an inhibitor to progress that is similar to the concern we have looked already, namely the “visual encoding of scholarly information”: the imprecise and ambiguous redundancies in the print layout of a text that make communication slow and transmission difficult. He writes:

“Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They imply a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a strange fact in that most logical field.”

Could we say the same thing about the notation of the way we write? How we indicate headings, paragraphs, footnotes, etc?

Beyond the generation of information? Where does Bush see the computer as helpful?

Bush’s focus here takes an interesting turn. Unlike many of the military uses forseen for the computer, namely the crunching of numbers and generation of ballistic trajectories, he imagines a feature of computing power that lies “between the lines” so to speak.

That is, he imagines the computer being helpful not just in the generation of data, but in the unique and novel ways that data might be connected, broken apart, and re-connected.

This might be a useful point to remind ourselves of the concept of metadata. To make such connections, we need to keep track of data.

This is not done with eyeballs, ears, or writing. With enough abstraction, we should see this once more as an “information problem”. That is, keeping track of information becomes simply the task of generating information about information ad infinitum.

Bush sees this better than most and he imagines what could be possible when the computer is able to manage both the data and the metadata.

What is the name of the machine he imagines in order to illustrate these possibilities? How does it work?

In the constructions of trails of association, one thing that seems to be remarkable is the RE-USE of information (at a granular level, a paragraph here, a photo, a page, etc) in NEW-CONTEXTS. The construction of NEW-HIERARCHIES (new kinds of associations) from old HIERARCHIES. This strikes me at once as both a simple innovation, and a startling powerful one from the point of view research discovery.

He goes on:

p. 17 “and his trails do not fade”.

This also strikes me as important. In many cases in research, we build associative trails in order to arrive at a conclusion. We then write an article about our conclusions, while casting aside the trail of data we used to make this conclusion. We generally do this because the printed medium does not have the space to record all our data. While understandable, this makes the conclusion of research less transparent and less verifiable through repetition.

Bush here imagines the ability to save and name the trail, creating the possibility of the future re-use and future-re-discovery of what is often lost in scholarship.

Literary Machines

Let us turn now to now the pioneering thought of Ted Nelson. Nelson was fascinated with Bush’s ideas and, since he was writing closer to the dawn of the personal computing and internet age, he was able to envision more possibilities. Likewise, he also saw the limitations of the print medium with more urgency.

Perhaps more than anything else, Nelson seems concerned with the “rigidity” of the linear sequence enforced by print media.

“We are used to sequential writing, and so we come easily to suppose that writing is intrinsically sequential.”

In particular: Nelson identifies two problems with sequential writing:

“1) it spoils the unity and structure of interconnection. 2) It forces a single sequence for all readers which may be appropriate for some.

Let’s briefly consider each of these concerns.

Concern 1: spoils the unity and structure of interconnection

Concern 2: single sequences are not always appropriate for everyone.

Nelson v Allen 1979 Interview

Listen to at least the first half (up to the 11 minute, 18 second mark) of the following interview and then consider the following questions.

A Concern: Limiting Metaphors

One concern that many theorists have is not merely about the limitations that come through the print medium, but about the extent to which these limitations will be needlessly carried forward into the new medium. Their concern is that, without serious critical reflection, certain types of social inertia will destine us to reproduce these limitations within the new medium. Where once these limitations (such as “lack of interconnectivity” and “static linear sequence”) were enforced by the logic of the medium, they are now no longer enforced by the medium but by our unwillingness to think beyond our comfort level.)

This critique is made most powerful by Ted Nelson:

He also made this critique is a discussion of the pioneers of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) at Xerox PARC.

“The usual story about Xerox PARC, that they were trying to make the computer understandable to the average man, was a crock. They imitated paper and familiar office machines because that was what the Xerox executives could understand. Xerox was a paper-walloping company, and all other concepts had to be ironed onto paper, like toner, to be even visible in their paper paradigm.” .. Today’s arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That’s where we’re stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. (‘WYSIWYG’ generally means ‘What You See is What You Get’ — meaning what you get when you print it OUT). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today’s software concepts. (Nelson 1999)

Joris Van Zundert (Barely beyond the book) gives us a helpful vocabulary for voicing this complaint.

He calls it “paradigmatic regression”.

I have previously argued that social shaping of technology can lead to ‘paradigmatic regression’. These are acts of shaping that translate an expression of the paradigm of the new technology into an expression of a paradigm that is already known to the user. Resistance to new technologies, where the use or sophistication of the new technology is denied, can of course be a motivator of paradigmatic regression. Not all regressions are necessarily motivated by conservatism or resistance, however. But even when users do embrace a new technology, the act of its social shaping may create a paradigmatic regression effect. An example of this effect can often be found when a metaphor is used in a graphical user interface (GUI).”