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.
Hello JJ! It’s certainly interesting to read about how the medium in which we consume media effects how and what we consume. It’s easy to take different mediums for granted and interact with them without thinking about their impact. As you mention, without the large-scale publication of scientific treatises during the Renaissance, plenty of ideas and theories would’ve either taken a significantly long time to test and hypothesize around, wrongly developed, or would’ve been lost to obscurity. As our society develops new technology, algorithms, and apps our ways of thinking and approaching problems change. Whether it be for the better or worse, our culture is changing to accommodate these new mediums.
This is a great post, as you are taking one idea/quote and exploring its ramifications. Your point about the role of fixity of print in relation to the emergence of science and truth is an important one, and I hope that you will lead us in conversation on this topic tomorrow
Hello JJ!
Your post really got me thinking, and the points you made are extremely crucial in today’s digital age. Borsuk explains the intimacy with a book and we saw 19th century marginalia where readers got to interact with readings by markings in the margins. However, most of our media today is through passive formats. I started to ponder on how “marginalia” looks with social media and whether commenting on a post, kind of like what I’m doing right now, would be considered digital-age marginalia. We consume a blog post, tik tok, article, etc., then we interact and develop media intimacy as we would when we annotate a book.