spleen

Occasionally, I encounter someone who proclaims the death of books. The digital realm has deprecated the print realm, so the argument goes, and books are unwieldy/unsearchable/bad for the environment/etc. The same argument is more often applied (I think) to magazines and newspapers, which (so the argument goes) should be present these days only in museums that describe to us the medieval implements of yesteryear.

The counter-argument to this usually has to do with the virtues of bookishness. We counter with vaguely lofty discussions of the pedagogical advantages to doing research in print media, or the contemplative life and its long association with libraries and big dusty volumes, or the reliability of print sources versus digital sources. All of those things might be true, and they might not — but one thing that is generally true is that these counter-arguments do little to sway those who believe we should all own a Kindle and rely on Project MUSE for our research.

But there's a much more significant counter-argument, I think: class. The deprecation of print media in favor of the digital assumes access to computers and the internet. It assumes a level of wealth that permits ownership of at least one computer or similar device, and an infrastructure that permits digital distribution of information. According to International Telecommunication Union statistics, there are 76.2 computers to every 100 people in the United States. Since nearly everyone I know owns more than one computer (I own five, not counting my PDA and cell phone), it stands to reason that there is a substantial minority of the U.S. population that doesn't have regular access to computers. These are the people you see in libraries and internet cafes; they are largely elderly, poor, and/or indigent. When I worked for a government employment agency in California, I encountered this portion of the population regularly – they came in to use our computers for resume preparation, typing tutorials and the like, and often they needed a good amount of basic computer training beforehand because, contrary to what we're told, computers weren't even remotely "intuitive" for them. The decline of print media means the exclusion of these people from the life of the mind, current events, and everything else that appears in books, newspapers and magazines. The poorest of us would be entirely reliant on the government or the wealthy for access to news and education. This might already be the case, but the celebration of the digital realm marks (in my experience) the first time intelligent people have argued that it's a good thing.

This doesn't take into consideration poorer countries, where computer ownership and literacy are much lower. The digital era has increasingly made the news something that happens to them, not something in which they participate.

The internet began as a great experiment, and early on, we envisioned this as the cornerstone to a "global village." Increasingly, we've seen it become a global gated community, permitting only those wealthy enough to participate in the experiment with vigor, regularity, and cultural and financial capital appropriate to the community. Consequently, the commons has declined, and the internet has steadily been dominated by commercial ventures at the cost of intellectual ones. The death of books would be an unjust and irresponsible continuation of this trend, widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

This entry was posted Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under computery stuff, media / news, rant, theory. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.