It will never fail to intrigue me how, for the most part, people want definitive answers. Humans want to be able to define the things they interact with and have claim of material knowledge, but in a lot of cases, it’s simply impossible. There’s always more to the conversation than x is x because we say it’s so or a professional has given it a definition. Like, yes, that is true, but anything’s existence is shaped by everything around it. Nothing exists in a bubble, and that could not be any truer than it is for books. 

In learning about “What Is the History of Books” and having a glimpse of “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” I got to read about the evolution of how people approach artifacts, media, and, quite frankly, the world. Within the first “school” of book history, there was a focus on the books of essay access, aka the books from the upper echelon who could afford a variety of books. But, the Annales school brought a new perspective to book history, a more common perspective “on the most ordinary sort of books – to discover the literary experience of ordinary readers” (Darnton, 3). By focusing on the ordinary, the understanding of societies becomes more complete and holistic. 

When considering how book history has shifted to be more inclusive and look at any sort of media, I wonder how book historians will approach the digital, especially with the mass of information out there. What will be considered culturally significant? What will be overlooked? When reading about the Internet Archive and its mission to digitize media, I thought about the overwhelming amount of information out on the internet and how much of it gets missed. I often use Internet Archive to access textbooks I can’t afford to buy, and though they have plenty of textbooks, sometimes they don’t. Which led me to question how much we can truly digitize or preserve online, especially when things become outdated or buried under other searches.