Progress and Its Remediated Fear

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What I found most interesting about not only chapter 1 of Borsuk’s book but also Thursday’s class was the multiple fears of the advancement of literature from various influential people of their time. Socrates and Plato were named in both and in the Book, Borsuk says, “The great thinkers of Ancient Greece, in fact, mistrusted writing as a technology that would destroy the oral arts of debate and storytelling on which they based their sense of the world, of philosophy, of time and space.”(55). In class professor Pressman commented on the close relationship writing has to politics and it seems like Plato, Socrates, Hugo, Nietzsche, Derrida, along with many others had the same fears we seem to now have today, yet, they are remedial.

The anxieties, fears, and worries that plague us about our future have already had a host. The same fears that created a disdain of the written word for Socrates, “for separating ideas from their source-“, are now ones many of us today fall for (Borsuk 55). If I remember correctly, it’s true what Socrates said about dialogue being stronger than the written word. Today, for example, many forms of media and new websites use ‘clickbait’ titles and false narratives, not to seek the truth, but to profit and entertain. Furthermore, the popularity in audio books and podcasts is also a bit worrying. It was very eye opening and comforting even, to see these great thinkers and philosophers of the past share many of the same feelings I did. That weariness of change, the unavoidable path forward, to progress, to the future unknown; “Their concerns echo contemporary anxieties about the ways digitally mediated reading and writing shortens our attention spans, and ability to engage deeply with texts (Borsuk 59). It is somewhat strange to read that. That our contemporary worries have also been ancient ones just remediated. It reminds me about our conversation about book history in general. That these ways of linear thinking serve no purpose other than to blind us to the whole picture. And its important to note that, “writing itself fundamentally changed human consciousness, much as our reliance on networked digital devices has altered us at the core.” (Borsuk 60). Progress demands change and with that change come both good and bad, “The thing we fear is precisely what worried the Ancients: mediation.” (Borsuk 60).

While time has only proven that the written language has helped develop human civilization to grow exponentially in every way, so too will the number of problems multiply. And it is precisely here that worries me, but also those before. That especially now, we cannot trust what we read and see, we have to question everything and remain aware. A worry that many of us have today but that was long ago held by a greek: “At the root of Socrates’s accusation lies a vision of writing as a technology that interposes between thinker and thought, severing the two and allowing them to travel independently of one another.” (Borsuk 60).

The Book

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When reading chapter one of The Book, I was intrigued by the history of how the book has evolved as an object. From rock, to clay, to the papyrus scroll, etc- the book has changed forms so many times throughout our history. I knew that paper and the book evolved, but I had not realized how or why these technologies were created. To record history yes, but more importantly it seemed writing and reading was a big way to show off your education or high status in society. On page 15 of The Book it says “Unlike today’s libraries, the collection was developed not as a public good, but as a symbol of King Ashurbanpal’s stature and scholarly achievement. Evidence suggests the library was also consulted by priests, professionals, and members of the learned class- some tablets are inscribed with threats to would-be thieves demanding borrowed tablets be returned the same day.” This quote stood out to me because of the discussion of status and education like I mentioned earlier, but also the discussion of libraries. We talked in class today about how libraries have changed and what a library is has changed. The SDSU library (shoutout Trinity who mentioned this) has no books. It does, but you don’t see them unless you are searching for them. When I think of a library I have always thought about it as a home for books, or a quiet place where you go to check out a book. Now a library, like the Love library, is a place to study, chat, eat, and sit. Old libraries were used for the educated and the wealthy, not for the public, which is such a weird concept to think about because to me the library is the most public shared space I can think of. Books are meant to be shared and discussed, they are not meant to sit on shelves unread. I go to the library everyday of the week to do my school work, but in my four years of being here I have never checked out a book- I do that at the bookstore, where you pay for the book. In high school the library is how I always thought it was- a quiet place to rent out/read books, college libraries are very different. I am not sure when this changed or why, or maybe they were always like this. But until the discussion we had today I had never even thought about this fact. The library of my youth is drastically different from the library of my now. I guess this is like the book itself as an object, the library a place that used to hold them, that has changed as well after time. Now I am more motivated to actually check out a book here at SDSU and check out the stacks, but before this class I have never done so in my college experience. I can’t even remember the last time I went to an actual library with books. 

The Broadview Introduction to Book History 

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After reading the introduction to this text I was very intrigued with the discussion of the different types of reader, and seeing how I felt that I resonated with both types. “Immersive reading might mean that you are incapable of stopping to add a note, and even that you are able to read without being distracted by your environment” versus “Hyper-reading includes searching, filtering, skimming, and hyper-reading all the ways in which we might read a newspaper, magazine or website” (pages 7&8). Hyper-reading versus immersive reading are two types of reading that I think I fluctuate between. Sometimes I hyper-read when I am reading an article or text for class that is super long, or sometimes I will immersive read it if I need to fully understand and think about the text. It also depends if I am reading for a class or because I want to, sometimes I want to get through something fast and I will just hyper-read it. When thinking about these two different types of reading- that I had never heard about before- I realized how much I really use these types of reading in everyday life. That was super interesting to read about and then apply to my life, as I think it’ll help me better fluctuate the two when I need to the most.

That was not the only concept that intrigued me in this text, but also the general conversation about what makes someone a good or valuable reader. “The history of reading also raises questions about the nature or quality of attention itself” (page 6). We have sort of talked about this idea in this class, but I have also talked about it in my other classes as well. I find it interesting how some people think that someone can be “good” at reading. I do not think there is a “good” way to read, reading is good in general. I do not think one type of reading is more valuable than the other- like immersive versus hyper-reading- as both are valuable just in different situations. I think all genres are valuable as well, and just because someone might not think its valuable doesn’t mean it isn’t to someone else. This idea of superior reading or the “right” or “good” way to read is mind-blowing to me, as I had never thought that there is a wrong or write way. The superior complex some people have when it comes to reading, like nonfiction book vs a romance book, Is funny to me. Why would reading one think make you “better” or “right.” I think you can find value in reading both, reading in general is mind stimulation. Overall, this text made me think more about what voluble reading is to me, which is everything.

The Act of Reading

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“The Broadview Introduction to Book History” by Michelle Levy and Tom Mole navigates an introduction that discusses the beginnings of books and the long history of how a book came to be what we know it today. When I was reading this introduction, I was fascinated by the history of reading. On page xvii, it states, “Just as the book has taken many forms, so has reading: silently or aloud, perusing many books or repeatedly returning to the same one, paying close attention or skimming.” I was immediately intrigued by this paragraph because it goes into detail about when silent reading was becoming a standard and how there are many different ways to read. I thought that this was interesting because the act of reading is never considered when discussing books. I have never thought about the way I consumed a book can correlate to a sign of power. Today, reading silently is a common practice and is an individual activity whereas in the past, reading was done with others due to the scarcity of books and reading skills. Reading has changed the way that communities interact. People are no longer seeking out others to read to them since so many people are able to read. Having a group of people gather to hear someone read must have generated discourse and establish a strange power structure in what is being read and what they are willing to hear. On the other hand, living in a society where mostly everyone can read on their own can alter how someone interacts with that text. They are more prone to forming their own opinions before going out to discuss them with others. I am curious to see how this has affected comprehension and the minute yet powerful dynamics of who is reading and who is being read to. Reading is a skill that once it is taught, you can never unlearn the skill. This shows how important the act of reading can be and how it can redefine power structures. 

Week 3: Romanticizing Old Media 

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In « Old Media/New Media », the definition and use of new media being a new perspective of technology got me thinking about the fetishization and idealization of old media because of new media. It has been trends for multiple decades to romanticize old media whether it be books, movies, music, or technology. As a generation, I’ve noticed this resurgence of old record keeping and collections. I’ve noticed that in the wave of new media and digital record keeping, there’s a distrust of whether it truly will forever keep everything accessible. Yes, things will always be on the internet or main frame, but it’s the question of whether or when it will stop being accessible to common people.
Over time, updates come and things need to be backed up or older versions won’t be able to be processed. While things stay forever, the digital format is growing so rapidly, websites and old applications even from ten years ago take much longer to load or don’t work. It happened to me when I tried playing a flash game that I played in middle school that no longer worked. Flash isn’t supported by my computer anymore and blockers won’t let me download it or bypass it.
Changing governments over time can also change the access to media. Government documents right now are being deleted from certain websites. While we can still access it as other forms or on other websites, going to the main place we usually find these documents and political information make it a step harder to find these things. This creates a form of censorship and real time evidence that historical information we thought we could have forever can be deleted or made harder to access in real time. In this era, we’re witnessing these things get harder to attain and we get worried.
I think this generation is scared of having their childhood memories be unattainable or unplayable because of slower systems not being able to work anymore or it being blocked from access. By fetishizing old media and using it like saving childhood books, 3D’s, or DvD’s, we are trying to save our childhood memories from being lost. As well as romanticizing old media like vinyls, we’re trying to create memories with things that can’t be taken away because it’s tangible, not digital.

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.

Why invent ‘new’ media?

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While reading both texts for this week, there was a specific quote that caused me to question why ‘new’ media is made/pursued. The quote is as follows: “Yet the work of the new is precisely what inspires us to reconsider the old and to recognize the intersections and convergent histories of old and new” (Pressman 1). This flip of thinking about ‘new’ and ‘old’ media from the perspective of new to old is what caused the question of why people decide to make ‘new’ media to surface in my brain. And the answer I came to is that the ‘new’ media often has an aspect that ‘old’ media does not, and that aspect generally makes the dissemination of ideas and knowledge (etc.), faster, easier, more efficient, and more widespread. People decided to advance their existing media into ‘new’ media to achieve those aforementioned goals of faster, easier, more efficient, and more widespread distribution of ideas and knowledge (etc). Because people naturally want to share their ideas and knowledge. While I read the Broadview text first, the quote in Dr. Pressman’s article caused me to look back to the first reading, and connect it with the previous question and answer. In the Broadview text, each new iteration of media/technological advancement (scrolls, codex, printing press, decrease in printing cost, and the addition of the internet) had a shorter timeline than the previous (also stated previously in class). This is due to the why question posed at the beginning of this blog, and its subsequent answer. The more advanced things got, the quicker information spread, and people were able to come up with new ideas in a quicker/easier fashion, that then become ‘new’ media. While the book as a medium can be considered ‘old’ media to some degree, even something like sprayed edges and more creative cover designs adds a ‘new’ element that causes those books to be more widespread and in a way ‘new’ media because it has become more than ‘just’ a book. (I’ve definitely bought a book just because I liked the sprayed edges and cover design—I actually really enjoyed the book, but originally bought it because of the book’s physicality as an object, or what Dr. Pressman would describe as bookishness). Sometimes, more people are likely to buy a book because of the aesthetics, but also end up genuinely enjoy the text or story inside, but it wouldn’t be as widespread if it wasn’t as attractive physically (some people do judge a book by its cover).

Week 3: Intertwined Archaeal of New/Old Media

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Our class readings this week felt like an awakening moment for me. For the past two weeks, I found myself perplexed by the discussions we’ve had in class. Not because the information being shared was a foreign concept, but because I was peering through a narrow-minded lens stating that the shift between new media to old media is a linear historical narrative.

Dr. Pressman unveils in her essay “Old/New Media” the term “bookishness” where the new digital media carves the new purpose for the traditional codex. Books are no longer depicted as holders for information, but as works of art, aesthetic objects, or even a multimedia experience. The simplistic linear ideology of “out with old and in with the new” is challenged as new media reinvents and adapts the purpose and perception of old media. Therefore, creating a boundless cycle of relativity to the term “new media.”

Reflecting on this, I began to connect Dr. Pressman’s idea to the digital text we debriefed las week, Mark Marino’s Marginalia in the Library of Babel. Marino’s work highlights how media forms are always shaped by the cultural perceptions of what is “new” or “current” media. For example, new media mindsets have encouraged us to regard books as objects of desire with symbolic and artistic value. On the other hand, less formal forms such as annotations in the margins or simple yellow Post-it notes inside a book do not carry the same level of prestige. While books are held to the highest of regard because of the ideals set by “new media,” personal annotations are viewed as disposable, even though they also contribute to the layered history of texts are used and interpreted.

Here I remain curious and my questions still remain. What determines the hierarchy of celebrated and dignified medias? How are we to excavate an object of knowledge knowing that it will continue to be ever changing? Or even how will marketing ventures utilize the study of book history to their advantage?

Why Click on This?

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If I were to count on my fingers how many times I’ve accepted a terms & conditions agreement with zero knowledge of what that actually implies, I’d have to be an octopus. Well, maybe you can’t call suckers fingers, which would also mean tentacles aren’t arms, but is that really relevant? Was anything in that introduction of value? I’d bet, and with regard to Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s “Introduction” from The Broadview Introduction to Book History, only a couple of those words were retained by you, the reader. In this effect (if it worked), an element of “hyperreading” is displayed which prompts the question: Why do we value the information we retain?

Readers pick and choose largely on the degree of difficulty or enjoyment they find in the writing. I mention these two together because oftentimes, they coincide. In 2018, A study using PISA found across nearly half a million 15-year-olds, “higher reading enjoyment reduces the perceived difficulty (cognitive load) of a task, which in turn improves reading achievement.” As I had prematurely assumed, a book’s readability is not lowered by a dislike of difficulty, but a preference for something more understandable. There appears to be a sweet spot of challenge and joy. For example, if I were learning Spanish, or anything really, it would be preferable to read in relation to my skill set. But that much is clear: there’s a reason I’m not enrolled in a Spanish level 500 class.

This first sentence is a big claim preceding lines of evidence and reasoning supporting said claim. The second sentence’s relevance always tends to fall in the shadow of the first’s. This is somewhat understood, and probably plays into the primary effect, which is the idea that beginnings make a more vivid and substantial impression in our mind, rather than beginnings or ends. I looked into this while investigating the “F pattern” scanning method mentioned in the text. Though it’s also understood through conditioning. In education, we’re taught the CER method. And in practicing hyperreading, why read further if the claim doesn’t intrigue you?

There is an influence from the writer on the information retained, not solely the reader. This can come in many forms, like I mentioned first, a lengthy terms & agreements section that you “scroll through” meanwhile you’re just trying to play Subway Surfers. Though I made the connection in the very sentence detailing it in the introduction. It goes, “This kind of reading seems qualitatively different from what has been described as ‘hyperreading…’ all ways in which we might read a newspaper, magazine, or website (Hayles, Broadview Reader in Book History [hereafter BRBH] 491-510.” As I’m sure you just did, I skimmed over the citation without a second thought. Even if I was intensively reading beforehand, my mind made an unconscious switch, which I believe was intentional by the author. This showcase is more explicit than sneaky tactics lurking in our media today, though it’s a clear example.

Most of what I’ve said is probably adrift from you by now. Whether you haphazardly scanned it, deemed you already knew it, or flat-out disliked it, most will fade away into your endless pile of information overload. Though maybe, for some odd reason, with nothing to do with anything I’m saying, you’ll remember an octopus.

The Many Parts of the Whole Book

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The Broadview Introduction to Book History by Michelle Levy and Tom Mole begins by explaining the origins of the book. Known as a codex, they were pages bound together along a spine with a cover. It took some time for them to become the predominant tool for sharing written information over the scroll, but religions, particularly Christianity, helped popularize the codex. The chapter continues with a brief description of book history as a subject of study. Different cultures and groups of people all found different ways to study the book. In France, the beginning of book history studies focused on the circulation of books and their effect on large historical events. In Germany, the focus was on the history of how books were published and distributed. Literary students looked at the book in a different way than a historian, or information studies students, or an art historian, or an economist. And now, digital humanities and media studies scholars are again, looking at the book in a new perspective.

After reading this section, I thought about everything that goes into a book. Sure, the content, author, and cover are important, but I’ve realized that I haven’t spent too much time pondering all of the other aspects of a book. How did this information become a physical object in my hands? Trees were grown with the intention of becoming paper, and that paper has been dyed a certain color, cut to a certain size, and text, that someone decided to write and someone else decided that the public would benefit from having said information, was printed on said paper. The font was picked, the font size was picked, the font color was picked. And not without careful thought and consideration, they were specifically chosen by people who believed that the specific typeface would enhance the text. Hardcover or paperback, or both, or neither. Artists designed the cover to be appealing, but different types of books are appealing for different reasons. Designers made covers for both a romance novel and a self-help book. And once the book has been designed it still needs to be produced and distributed throughout the world. It has to be priced, high enough to pay all of the people involved in the process, but low enough for people to buy.

I’ve thought about the politics of books. How could I not? With calls of censorship and book banning I’ve always viewed the politics of books strictly through the lens of the content of the book. But politics doesn’t just mean culture wars. Everything that exists is political, and political is not a negative term. I look forward to beginning my studies on book history!