The Book as Artifact

In the transition from physical to digital books, are we losing our deeply personal relationship with the written word?

Things get lost. The details of our daily lives get pureed in the hubbub of the mind. We naturally forget. The artifacts of our lives get stuffed in closets, stored under staircases, and hidden in the caverns of our basements and attics. Recently, when my family home was sold – the place we grew up – we began sifting through the mass of forgotten items.

Old skis and hockey sticks, discarded guitars, and long out of style clothes were all thrown into piles either relegated to trash or designated as charity. It was easy to sort these items based on the question of whether or not they held any practical value or were useful in some way.

But the basement cupboards were also packed with books. My father is an English professor and has a trail of books that has followed him from New Jersey to Vancouver since the 1960s, and could probably cover that distance. We filled box after box after box with his books. Some were well read, margins covered in ticks and notes, others never opened. Everything had to find a new home; nothing was relegated as useless. In our family, it is complete sacrilege to even consider throwing away a book.

As we lugged these boxes to used bookstores and donated them to school libraries, I was overcome by the power of the artifact inherit in these objects, a notion that is changing drastically as bits and bytes replace ink and pages.

We have already confronted and accepted the loss of our physical music collections. Although similar to what is happening with the physical to digital shift in books, music is very different. Records, tapes, even CDs are reproductions of the sounds. They are unpacked and performed by stereos and amplifiers, and experienced by our senses. Books, on the other hand, are totally abstracted from the experience we have with them. They are mere symbols that are unpacked in our minds and experienced in the obscure realms of thought and imagination. It is this magical element to the written word, as a special key to the mind, that gives books more metaphysical weight, and by extension the artifact of the book carries this cultural heft.

Books carry the weight of time with their faded covers and dusty spines. The inscriptions and hand-written notes in light pencil have a human touch, a painterly mark. Books not only contain chapters of ideas and stories, but also represent chapters in lives, challenges overcome, goals accomplished. The worn, dog-eared pages stand as testaments to accomplishment, proudly declaring: I read that. I know more than I did before.

When we turn a digital page, what happens? It disappears. This is the modern information age. Instant access when we turn it on, non-existent otherwise. I bought an Amazon Kindle recently and am trudging through a few books on it. Most notably, The Trial by Franz Kafka. My experience with the novella on the Kindle is strangely Kafkaesque. There is no book on my night table achingly calling for me, there is no bookmark mocking me for my slow progress. I forget that I’m even in the middle of the novel until I’m on a plane and don’t have anything else to read. I remember, oh yeah, Kafka! And I flick on the screen, and my cursor flashes at the last word I read, as if I’ve never left. It’s not like when you’re in the middle of Anna Karenina and that brick of pages just wont go away, pushing and prodding and, ultimately, rewarding you.

The question is twofold: what happens to our legacies of learning in a digital age, and how does the incorporeal nature of digital media change our relationship to it? Knowledge is absorbed through passing encounters rather than through a deep connection with artifacts of knowledge. Information floats around us like a cloud; it is not found in shelves of dog-eared books, but rather in the digital ramblings, the links and comments, and posts and profiles.

In fact, avant-garde computer scientist and self-proclaimed futurist Jaron Lanier, warns in his book, You Are Not A Gadget, that the design of digital infrastructure limits human expression and, ultimately, human nature itself. Pointing to techno-social structures like Facebook where the database design determines how we interact with our friends or how blogging platforms mediate and limit how we write, it is the technology that unwittingly shapes our sense of self. Essentially, he is lamenting the loss of the blank canvas.

In one sense, this is a hopeful trend, for it reflects a more natural, dynamic exchange with ideas. It is a knowledge environment based around sharing and discussion rather than the monolithic immutably of printed texts.

Marshall McLuhan articulates the nature of print society as one of rigidity and linear structure as opposed to that of a manuscript society, which is dynamic and anchored around human connection and exchange. Even a cursory examination of the current knowledge ecosystem reveals tendencies that echo a manuscript society and represents a reversion to the roots of our informational DNA.

However, what we do lose is the legacy that comes with the artifact. That is, the inheritance of items that bear the evidence of the human hand and the inspiration that comes from such encounters. My comments on a blog post will not fade, but they do not carry the emotion of my father’s scribbles and wobbly underlines in the copies from his college library. Aptly, the only thing I wanted from those dusty boxes were the faded, complete works of Marshall McLuhan.