Week 3: The Intricate Dance of Old/New Media

Posted on by
1

When I read Jessica Pressman’s essay about old and new media, a quote from it that really stood out to me was “Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops.” (pg. 2) I felt that this observation really challenges a dominant cultural narrative that I see myself coming across a lot. That this idea that technological advancements follow a predictable path in which new technology eventually replaces older technology, making the former generation of technology outdated.

Another part of the reading that fascinated me was Pressman’s concept of “bookishness” as a response to the perceived danger of digital media to print culture. It seems that modern literature has started to fetishize books as a pleasing object to look at rather than just letting it fade away in the face of screens. I think that this type of occurrence shows how old media actively changes in response to new media, as it frequently becomes more strongly itself in the process rather than passively absorbing its effect.

Thinking about this dynamic, I can’t help but be reminded of vinyl records, in which it made a notable comeback right in the middle of the digital music streaming era. Vinyl’s very much focused more on its physical qualities, such as the album cover, the ritual of actually playing a record, and the cozy real sound. Rather than attempting to compete with the ease of digital technology. I found that vinyl records started to highlight their tactile, physical characteristics in ways that set them apart from their digital counterparts, much like Pressman’s bookish novels.

Furthermore, I thought that Pressman’s use of Hayle’s alternative term “intermediation” together with Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation” raises significant issue regarding directionality and agency in the evolution of media. “Intermediation” better represents the ongoing, bilingual aspect of media influence that Pressman outlines, while on the other hand, “remediation” would imply a rather linear process of new media altering the old. The chain of feedback is an ongoing process of mutual modification rather than merely new things impacting old things.

This had me wondering, what more examples of “bookishness” or related trends may we uncover in the media world of today? For instance, how do established newspapers highlight their trustworthiness and materiality in the face of digital journalism? How do physical retail establishments renew themselves in the face of online shopping?

Week 3: Mapping the Limits of the Library with Media Ecology

Posted on by
Reply

Our readings this week prime us to approach Special Collections materials within a “media ecology” (Jessica Pressman, “Old Media/New Media”). Operating themselves in this ecology, these readings cite diverse scholarly approaches to book studies. While this is my third time reading Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017) with Dr. Pressman, I’m struck by the immensity of information and approaches to information cataloged in the History. As we prepare to enter Special Collections, I’m struck by a deep thought: There’s a lot to read. How do we read a lot?

If we understand each book as a networked media object, we must read this object’s contexts across time and place. To use Dr. Pressman’s term from “Old Media/New Media”, how do we read an “ecology of interrelated feedback loops” if all are entangled? How does one read an ecology? How do we focus or curate our readings of an object when we understand its paratext to spiral in directions and scopes beyond our comprehension? If the book object is assembled and networked so pervasively, how do we decide the scope of our reading? As Dr. Pressman said of digital hypertext in last week’s class, how does the reading end, and how do we decide where it ends?

What Dr. Pressman calls the “linear historical narrative that describes the shift from old to new media” (2), thoroughly unwound by book archaeology, is tempting because it makes reading media easier. Questions of immense scope are detangled; the singular reader retakes authority to create a sequential history and to construct singular meanings from this easier narrative. This reduced “flowchart” history is popularly bent to political ends. We don’t need to fall into this practice just because it’s easier – rather, it is important that we commit to following the confusions and uncertainties of research if we really want to meet and draw more nuanced interpretations of our book objects.

Without needing to construe reading history through the transitional “intensive to extensive reading” model, we can recognize that the way we approach reading is influenced by our perception of how many things are available to read (Levy and Mole xviii). I realized during our discussion of Mark C. Marino’s Marginalia in the Library of Babel that many hypertexts take me longer to process than static texts because they offer no readout showing how much content remains to be read. As a mortal thing, having some concept of when – or at least if – I’ll end a reading informs how I apportion my time and attention. My attention transitions out of the text and through others. Instead of expecting a fixed termination point, then, I think I’ll enter Special Collections with the framework that my reading of a book object will be transitional: our feedback loops will pass through each other. Maybe the ending that will guide my reading is not the limit at which a reading or history terminates, but the transitional process that happens when the book object takes on new meaning. It’s not a cessation, but a transition into more and radiating loops. I need to pay attention to my reading processes in order to notice when this transition is taking place.

Last week, Borges’ narrator in The Library of Babel conjured “[an] unspeakably melancholy memory: I have sometimes traveled for nights on end, down corridors and polished staircases, without coming across a single librarian” (114). Borges philosophically dramatizes conflicts surrounding the ways in which people approach books and reading as cultural practices; here the conflict is not between opposing readers but in the echo chamber of an intellectual journey undertaken alone. I am grateful that we populate our own Library within the massive ecology of scholarship, expertise, and curiosities of people across time and place.

Books Tell Time and Human Adaptation

Posted on by
2

It has become relatively clear that we can base the time period of a book on its physical body. Of course, these time periods could range hundreds to thousands of years, but the way we read shows us how we’ve adapted. Although it wasn’t necessarily explicitly spoken on, humans are constantly looking for the easiest, most efficient ways to do things. This includes reading.

In The Broadview Introduction to Book History, Michelle Levy and Tom Mole explain the four epochs of book history. Even before the first epoch of books, we read from scrolls and, because of Christianity, codices became more commonplace. Second, after hundreds of years, “the printing press…made it possible to produce large numbers of (reasonably) accurate copies much faster” (xv). Because printed matter was so much quicker, it was also much more expensive. However, the third epoch occurred over several years as the prices decreased and the prints were continuously used. Finally, we stand in the fourth epoch, with digitized books we can hold in our back pocket.

In one way or another, the media adapts to our human adaptations. Therefore, we are carrying this evolving matter through our history as we find newer ways to transport information. Yet, as Professor Pressman notes, “media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops” (“Old/ New Media”). Unlike being able to define the eras of books throughout history, it is difficult to determine the difference between the old and the new uses of books. I find this very fascinating especially since we have no way of knowing just how changed our method of reading will be 100 years from now. What used to take thousands and hundreds of years to develop can occur in decades. 

While it’s clear that the digitization of books is a current phenomenon, I wonder how long it will be until we switch to something else entirely.

The Syncretism of Reading and Technology

Posted on by
1

Reading the Broadview Introduction as well as Professor Pressman’s essay, Old Media/ New Media was fascinating. From the examination and tracing of epochs, categorizing new and emerging forms of media to the evolution of reading in all its forms, it’s clear to see that, through many cultural shifts and religious/ industrial revolutions, reading and books in general have taken various forms, reflecting their cultural placement in that time.

I want to highlight the evolution of reading because I think its very pertinent to us right now. I’ve also never read a deconstruction of it and it particularly caught my eye. The introduction mentions an example where the Theologian St. Augustine observes his mentor reading silently: “He recalls how”[w]hen[Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Augustine seems to have found silent reading unusual enough to be worth commenting on. Before this, he implies, most people vocalized the text when they read, even if they were reading to themselves.” (Levy & Mole xvii). Later in the text Levy and Mole highlight how Alexander the Great did so as well but that the concept of silent reading as a whole took a while to catch on, as reading aloud was so ingrained in most cultures if not all (xvii). Thinking about this made me realize how we are currently shifting into a new era of reading and how back then there was the emergence of reading silently stemming from reading aloud.

From having an orator read from a scroll in front of a crowd in antiquity to children being read aloud bedtime stories as well as oral presentations in class, reading aloud has always been a crucial form of learning, retaining, and communicating. But the blooming popularity of audiobooks and reading on a screen creates a drastic shift yet again. Although I do want to point out that one doesn’t take over the other: “Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops” (Pressman 2).

I am curious to see where the remediation of reading goes. How the process of intensive and extensive reading change due to technological advancement. How the syncretism of technology and reading converges. We are already seeing it now with books as a fetishized object, a phenomenon professor Pressman calls “Bookishness”: ” -the result of new media’s impact on
literature’s old media, and it is one example of the complex, poetic, and mutually generative relationship between old and new media.”(3).

Right now, since we are at the dawn of this new age, I feel like it’s unbalanced and overwhelming how reading is changing, but hopefully, with time, once settled(audiobooks, AI), we will learn how to harness both mediums and be able to work in tandem with one another, creating syncretism between the two. That is my hope at least.


The Life and Death of Books

Posted on by
1

Although I was born and grew up in Germany, I am still learning about Germany in another country. The memorial from Berlin, which represents an empty bookshelf and serves as a symbol for the burned books from the Nazi era, has remained in my thoughts ever since. Were only sheets of paper with signs burned back then or were identities of individuals destroyed?

Reading “Book History” by Levy and Mole, I quickly realized that books not only convey certain content, but are also material objects with a history.  When someone asks me what a book is, I don’t know how to answer the question. To be honest, I never thought about it. I saw the book as a book. I didn’t have an answer to the question. Since attending our course, I realize that a book is more than just sheets of paper stapled together to convey knowledge. Rather, they are created, distributed, read and can be destroyed. The memorial on Bebelplatz shows this aspect: books are fragile, vulnerable and mortal. This raises the question of what it means when books are destroyed? Is it only the destruction of an object or also of ideas?

It can be argued that books can be destroyed as objects, but not ideas, because these can be reproduced through reviews, copies and new editions. It depends more on how many people have read, distributed and studied the book. The idea that ideas and identities can be erased by burning books therefore proved to be wrong. Books as objects are perishable, but knowledge can have a different permanence. On the one hand, books are mortal because they consist only of paper and ink. On the other hand, they are immortal because their contents remain in the mind and are copied. The burnings rather refer to the fact that such books are usually destroyed because they are significant. 

In relation to the present day, this view is also significant. In the age of artificial intelligence, we realize that texts are not physical objects. Unlike the destruction of books, digital texts often disappear unnoticed from digital archives. This raises the question of whether digital books are more durable than printed ones or whether they are just as vulnerable.

The memorial is a reminder of what was destroyed. The transience of objects meets the permanence of knowledge. Although history as an object is destroyed, new stories are produced as a result. I also see the memorial as history. When I am back in Germany and visit Berlin, I will definitely take a look at the memorial and hopefully be able to answer the question of what a book finally is.

Is it Useless?

Posted on by
Reply

The Library of Babel

Spanning the entirety of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” each word seems to fit as though a dozen eyes meticulously swept through the text, line by line. Though during and after my reading, the inclusion of one peculiar word has piqued a curiosity never before known to me. As a result, the revelation is made through Borges’s short story that anything conceivable may be deemed useless due to its reliance on conception. 

Now that sounds like a lot of lengthy bullshit words jammed next to each other, but I believe (and that’s what’s important) that in Borges’ subtleties, this claim could withstand. 

The peculiar word “useless” is used five times throughout Borges’s story. Four stand in the text, with one as a footnote, though not all usages stood out to me at first. The difference relies on the understanding of what use implies, and specifically to whom. 

Due to ignorance and possibly human nature, I assumed the word implied specifically to humans. Looking up the definition of useful and seeing “able to be used for a practical purpose or in several ways.” I was surprised, though not all too convinced. Sure, a bee is deemed useful for a flower, and vice versa, but is this not told through the lens of a human? I pose the question to the class, as I’m genuinely curious, is anything objectively useful to something other than us, not because it betters our human circumstances or experience in this world, but because it just is. 

Though that is ultimately the point. Everything we know is seen through our lens. And in four of Borges’s usages of the word, they are used in relation to humans, besides one. When speaking of humanity’s eventual collapse, Borges says, “the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.” Though infinite, incorruptible, and precious, it serves nothing without someone able to conceive it. Without active engagement, is there any meaning behind any of these words–even a book of “ultimate truth” or one with “Godly wisdom?” Do humans really live that shallow of life, stuck in our own thoughts and ways, unable to tap into any other desire but our own? And really, what it’s asking is: what exactly is useful in the world external to our realities? Frankly, I don’t think we’ll ever know, or we can, but then again… why’s that useful to me?

A Bigger Beast

Posted on by
1

Marino’s text is more than just a continuation on The Library of Babel, but instead enhances upon the idea. Specifically when Marino adds, “It began when I read that story .” It is not so much the words in the sentence itself, but instead the hyperlink embedded in the sentence. Instead of looking physically (by physically I mean having to walk from one hexagon to another and manually picking out a book with one’s hands etc) for the next book or annotation one can immediately head to the next with just a click. By doing so Marino is showing that the interwebs is a place where choice is immediate, and it is much easier to fall down the rabbit hole of searching—everything is at your fingertips in almost an immediate fashion. This is a bigger beast than the library in Borges’s story because of that immediate access for people who can connect to the world wide web. And the choices can be even more overwhelming than within the library in the story due to the fact that most of the hyperlinks pressed often lead to a multitude of other possible hyperlinks. On top of that this speed makes the possibility of information even more fragmented, because one can switch so fast from one idea to another. This makes me question the choices the rest of you made. Did you click on the hyperlink in that sentence? Did you click a different one? Did you stop at just one? What were the choices you made, and how did time limit those choices?

Labyrinth and Links of the Internet

Posted on by
1

It has taken me quite awhile to digest the work of Borges and to develop my own thought process on the elaborate idea of the total library. Something that has helped me gather what to make of Borges’s legendary short story is Mark Marino’s metafiction “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” which has eased the connection into the 21st century.

I am stretched to incredible lengths to capture what is most meaningful between the two readings this week and I concede that the most impactful line, to me, is Borges stating “The Library exists ab aeterno“. This Library that Borges introduces in 1941 has stood the examination of of the last century, while the story itself feels like it has existed since the inception of the tool known as the book. In that sense, the story feels imperative to reread over and over again, especially in this modernized and expanded age of the library in the form of the internet. In retrospect, the vastness of the universe and the Library as Borges beautifully writes, has exponentially grown beyond imagination. And yet, the story’s most salient truths about the search and journey of knowledge reach deeper than ever.

What I took away from Marino’s short form metafiction is the perception of the internet. We brushed over this in class but the internet, like the Library, has slowly crept into the everyday lifestyle of nearly every country. What Marino’s blog, or marginalia, represents is the digitized hand users scribe daily, without a second thought about their footprint. He types, “Write in the margins, suggested my machine. Social annotation. It means that I exist or have existed.” Marino’s small contribution to the Library of Babel, the Library of the Internet, is from 2007. It feels like forever ago, and it feels a part of the Library that exists ab aerterno because it is. The marginalia he leaves with hyperlinks, highlights, and digital sticky notes are as powerful and meaningful as those previously left in the archived library of the universe. These digital notes also leave behind that someone was here, there, and everywhere. For myself and others, I think we tend to forget that integral part of the digital footprint marking the Library of Babel.

Introduction

Posted on by
1

Hey everyone! I apologize for the late post, but it’s finally being written. My name is Alvaro Mario Escamilla, but you can call me Mario! I am in my final semester here at SDSU and I won’t lie, I am nervous about graduating, but also excited! I am currently majoring in Single Subject English with a teaching credential in hope of teaching some grade between 10th and 12th for high school. I don’t really do anything interesting or rather crazy outside of my school life. I mostly exercise, read almost everything, watch movies, play video games or just hang out with my friends, family or girlfriend. I am currently watching The Amazing World of Gumball with my girlfriend as I have not seen it (please don’t roast me, I know I’m 3000 years late) and it is honestly so much fun and such a genius show. As for video games, I am just waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong which releases this Thursday, September 4th and I couldn’t be more excited.

I am currently reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole as a fun read and after that I plan to tackle a Japanese manga called “Jagaaaaaann” written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and illustrated by Kensuke Nishida. I am always looking for recommendations when it comes to books, stories, short shorts, novels, etc. I am a person who enjoys mostly every genre and isn’t really picky with what I pick up. I have always been a firm believer of being open to all genre’s because they all have some sort of insight or view to offer that you couldn’t get with another genre. Being able to read from vast works that come from different pens and brains is so fascinating and something that will never bore me, even till the day I die.

As for why I am taking this course, well, I enjoy reading and I am very interested in the history and concept as to what books are, how they are used and for what purpose do we ultimately use them for. I believe that books are an extremely powerful object and that is something that the world has slowly stopped noticing in my opinion.

Class Introduction

Posted on by
1

Hello everyone! Although a little late, I find it no better time than to properly introduce myself. My name is Samuel Peters, a third-year English major here at SDSU. I guess the first thing I’d like to address before I comment on anything else, is my innate love for stream of consciousness. The zen of writing–my mother used to call it, who her father taught her–has always been my preferred choice of giving meaning to this otherwise hollow world we live in. In effect, I trip over my words, but I’m working on becoming more carefree about tiny errors. This is why I prefer my writing unedited and raw, so that’s what it is–a raw reflection of not what I wanted, but could say in that moment.


I grew up in a comfortable household with two loving parents, a younger sister, and an even younger brother. With that comfort, my parents were able to put me through a good education, which is where I discovered my love for all things English. My teachers all the way through high school encouraged me to explore this love, which came in the form of journalism, short stories, collections of poetry, and a complete novel my senior year (which I can share more about if anyone’s curious.) Despite my disregard for editing, I had an editor work on my novel in my ongoing attempt to publish (probably self-publish). Though currently, I am working on a couple of other ideas–a screenplay, a novel or two, and my poem-a-day promise to myself. I guess what I’m trying to say is I am seeking further application of my passions into production.


I’m looking forward to this class as a way to dissect the very entity I love to create, as well as others. I’ve always been intrigued with the prospect of passing on my “knowledge,” if I can call it that, rather passing on my love for the art, and I think it’s important to understand exactly what I’m involved in before I can share my ideas. I think human expression is essential, especially in modern times when AI threatens that very thing. Though to say AI is an enemy is ignorance and completely disregards the welfare of societies to come.


I see an inevitable day where AI integrates into our educational system, so currently I am working on passion projects supporting our eventual transition. I see AI as a tool to enhance writing, not a detriment to free thought, and I’ve been working with it in depth in preparation for our future. Though enough of my droning, I’m here to write exactly and only what needs to be said. I am much more here to listen and take in what everyone cares to share! As is, thank you for this opportunity to deepen my love, and I hope you enjoy a couple of things I write and share throughout!

Here’s a photo below by the way–an off-putting glare taken on my rather lovely Canon that I cherish more and more with each photo.