Author Archives: JJ Rezaei

“The Medium is the Massage” and Other Forms of Cultural Change

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I thoroughly enjoyed Borsuk’s second chapter of Book. What really stuck out to me was the discussion about how the physicality of a book can impact the information inside it. For example, Borsuk mentions how “the publication of scientific treatises allowed scholars to engage in dialogue and debate with thinkers far removed, directly facilitating the spread of ideas that would flourish with the Renaissance” (84). In other words, the fact that science was being written down as opposed to being passed down orally allowed it to be spread much further and faster, thus leading to the Renaissance. New technology plays a strong role in creating and molding a certain type of society–whether that be through the accessibility of information or the way in which it is transmitted.

Another example of this phenomenon is “the passivity of watching television” which is juxtaposed with the “romance of disembodiment” that comes with reading (86). This can be connected to Marshall McLuhan’s argument in “The Medium is the Massage” that the medium is an integral part in how the message is interpreted by the audience. Here, Borsuk makes the argument that watching TV is a passive form of entertainment as opposed to the “romantic disembodiment” of reading. On top of the fact that media technology can radically change accessibility (thus the breadth and depth of that knowledge), a culture whose mass media is all books will differ from a culture whose mass media is all TV because there is an inherent difference in how these mediums are interpreted by most people.

Culture in Books and Books as Culture

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Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book explains the various forms of physical mediums that writing has taken up over time. In it, there is an inherent questioning of the literal definition of a book (Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines it as “A portable volume consisting of a series of written, printed, or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading”). Understanding the etymology of books brings its’ existence as a concrete concept into question in the same way that all of language is. For there to be an “objective” definition of what a book is would mean that there would need to be some sort of objective truth in the first place. Tracing the etymology of anything unveils that it is the result of hundreds, often thousands, of years of human experiences.

Because what a book physically is has changed so much over time (paper, papyrus, wood, or bamboo; written horizontally or vertically; read as we read it today or “like a laptop” (43)), the cultural experience of reading a book must have changed too. In the past, for example, being a scribe was a miserable experience, “they spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps…” (48). Today, anyone who would create a hand-written book would do it as an artisanal craft and presumably out of passion. What would be required of a book-maker is completely different today versus thousands of years ago. What I want to emphasize is that this creates a completely different experience with the book thus changing the relationship and context surrounding books and the book reading experience.

Books seem to have a cultural resurgence among Gen Z as entertainment–I feel that books lost this for a few decades when TV and video games ruled as modes of storytelling. I wonder if the accessibility of books today has something to do with their modern association as a leisure activity. It is now easier than ever to read any book that you can imagine, dozens of different tablets exist for this activity. Additionally, hundreds of websites exist that post various modes of literature that would have previously been in book form. It is perhaps this unprecedented ease of access that causes phenomena like “booktok” which specializes in leisurely and captivating reading.

The Big Difference Between Old Media and New Media

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Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s introduction to The Broadview Introduction to Book History gives a comprehensive overview of what to expect and what you should know before reading the upcoming pages.


I found myself thinking about books as a form of technology while reading this text. The modern technology I am most familiar with is computers, which also has epochs that reflect books. The transition from scrolls to the codex could be seen as a form of making written technology more efficient. Similarly, computers were initially massive, clunky, and much slower than a persons’ calculations. Over time, they became efficient and cheaper to produce (as reflected by Gutenberg’s printing press).


More and more people begin to work with computers as they become more accessible. Computers go from something that could only be found in the military to something only in the university. From there, it gradually becomes more accessible to the point that it is in most homes. This accessibility (as reflected in the fourth epoch of books) creates what could be argued as a “computer culture” in the West, exemplified by the graphic below.


Where this parallel breaks down is in the fourth epoch, “when print faces competition from an array of new media” (xvi). That may very well be because we haven’t reached that point yet. It could also be argued that the competition is AI. I would disagree with this, however, because AI does not seem to be a radically new technology. Rather, it is an example of the massive increase to the computational power as a result of Moore’s Law.


I am unsure how to feel about the concern that screens make us “worse” readers and putting a value judgement on “extensive” versus “attentive” reading. As mentioned in Professor Pressman’s article, Old Media/New Media, Marshall McLuhan says that “we march backwards into the future” (1). Is there something inherently bad about reading a few works extensively as opposed to many superficially? Could the end product be the same? Does it matter? Could it be, that our nostalgic love for books is painting how we see reading in the modern age? These are all questions that I am not sure I have the answer for yet.

Borges Knocks on the Door of Reality

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Frankly, I read this work twice over the course of 2 days but I feel like I need to read it many more. What I took from this work is a critique of the pursuit of objectivity. What is the library? The library is their universe which is analogous to our universe. The books are analogous to our information about the natural world. The passage regarding travelers feverishly searching for their “vindication” makes me think of those in (what Borges’ argues is an effectively futile) pursuit of who they “really are” or what the meaning of their life is.

“All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future… The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero” (5)

Borges also seems to explore religion from an Absurdist perspective. The criticism of the deep longing for a sense of belonging from a faith-based perspective reminds me a lot of Camus and his criticism of those who believe that the universe has an ultimate meaning:

“Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception” (7).

The revelation that the library exists “ab aeterno” (from an infinitely remote point of time in the past, according to Merriam-Webster) reminds me of Descartes’ revelation that the there is the mind (res cogitans) and the world outside the mind (res extensa). Both posit the universe as somewhere unattainably far away from the mind. This alienation of the human experience from reality/truth is dangerous because it rids the individual of agency, which is what I think Borges’ is trying to say when he writes “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms” (7).

I see Borges final affirmation that the library is cyclical as a way to demonstrate how something can have infinite meanings despite surrounding one material thing. In other words, there can only be a certain amount of variations due to the 25 total characters available for use in the books, 410 pages, 40 lines per page, etc. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be an infinite number of possibilities, however, because those variations can loop around. Similarly, even if there is a definite (yet near-infinity) amount of ways one can convey they perception of reality, once near-infinity runs out it may just loop back around again.

Introduction: JJ

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Hi all! My name is JJ. My family is from Iran but I was born in Australia and we all moved to the US when I was one (so no Australian accent unfortunately). I am a first year MALAS (Masters in Liberal Arts and Sciences) student and I graduated from SDSU last semester as an interdisciplinary studies major with a minor in philosophy. I love learning about how everything is related with each other and strongly believe nothing is produced in complete isolation.

I love social theory and hope to become a sociology professor one day. Dr. Choi in the sociology department has been a major influence in the way I think. I am interested in (but know embarrassingly little) about Postmodernism. I am considering writing my thesis regarding the social construction of reality and what it means to have “invisible” (non-linguistically defined) experiences.

I currently work as an A/V technician for the Student Union. I love the job because, simply said, it’s a lot of fun. Being behind the scenes and working with fancy equipment on major events as a student feels like a huge privilege. I also work as a Gen S instructor for first year students living on campus. This is my first semester so it is a very new job to me but so far I’m really enjoying it!

On the side, I love to cook. My favorite thing to cook is steak but I love making intricate salads as well. One of my favorite parts of cooking is looking at what’s in the fridge and figuring out how to make something that tastes great–kind of like an episode of master chef.

I am really looking forward to this class because I love learning about context. I know very little about books as a concept and am excited to learn more about it!