Chaucer, materiality and digital culture

Writing Monday’s blog post about “slow reading” spurred me to think more about how many critical attacks of the Internet and digital culture can be, ironically, as fragmented and as poorly substantiated as the critics claim the Internet to be. From the ivory heights of a blog post, many tend to bemoan the shortcomings of the Internet and related technologies, calling them detrimental to or incompatible with true academic writing and thought.

Of particular frustration to me are those who immediately dismiss the possibility of reading something that isn’t on a printed page. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading printed books as much as anyone. When I read I mark up the pages as much as possible; you won’t find pristine books on my bookshelf. Sometimes I feel as if I have relationships with books in a material way, as I am able to reciprocially imprint my ideas (if ephererally) onto their pages.

But despite my love for printed media, I don’t harbor any illusions that the printed page is the apotheosis of reading. I am academically and personally interested in new reading technologies, like those offered by the iPad and Kindle. My term paper for a media theory seminar I took at Princeton, for example, investigated potential political underpinnings of the Kindle DX (then a brand-new product). After the break, I’ll address how contemporary digital practices collide with reading culture by doing a little thought experiment with Chaucer.

One of the central ideas I have understood from my reading in media theory (and book history, which may as well be lumped in) is that our understanding and reception of texts is in part shaped by the medium it has been presented to us in. This is a more complex claim than the overly simplistic (but easy to repeat) line “the medium is the message.” Consider, for example, these three instances of the same text:

The first is an image of the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; the second, the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of the masterpiece; the third, a concept image to express the possibility of an e-book version on an iPad or other e-book reading device (forgive my terrible, terrible photo editing skills!). The transition between each of these images represents a major shift in the material culture of texts, each with a unique set of benefits and tradeoffs.

With the manuscript, for example, the reader is afforded access into the beautiful marginalia that is often in conversation with (and sometimes even in opposition to) the text it adorns. Furthermore, because of the economic conditions of production and transmission–they were expensive to create, no two are the same, and they were circulated only among the rich and literate–manuscripts are imbued with what one might call an “aura” of singularity. Much like original canvasses by Monet or Picasso, these manuscripts impress viewers with a sense of material closeness to the creator and creation and a sense of their uniqueness. Finally, the Ellesmere manuscript is significant in demonstrating how The Canterbury Tales was constructed from many competing versions and manuscripts, none of which had a single canonical order or version of each of the tales.

The second image, showing a mass-produced edition of Chaucer’s work, demonstrates how print culture has the tendency to canonize (of course it must be important if publishing houses like Penguin are printing thousands of copies!) and standardize (mass production dictates that each copy must be the same). The visual aspect of the original manuscript is completely lost, but there are added benefits–explanatory footnotes, for example, or introductions or contextual essays that might further one’s understanding of the text. My own reading of The Canterbury Tales was done in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which literally placed Chaucer in the canon of English literature, an act that carries more than just material significance: affecting how we read it and whether we read it in conversation with other texts. Finally, the act of reading a mass-produced print book is an isolated one. The benefits of paperback editions–portability, accessibility and low cost–mean that readers must not necessarily be part of any particular social group or class, and that they can read in complete isolation.

Today’s e-readers, like the iPad shown above and others such as the Amazon Kindle, connect these atomized readers through the Internet. But despite the slew of new changes that accompany these new devices, they have the tendency to emphasize how few changes there actually are. For instance, the iPad stresses in its marketing that the reading experience is as close as possible to a print book on this marketing page:

Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. You hold your iPad like a book. You flip the pages like a book. And you do it all with your hands — just like a book.

Despite these four consecutive sentences with the same simile, incessantly harping on the idea that the iPad is “like a book,” the advertising immediately proceeds to describe how the iPad isn’t like a book; essentially, what it offers that real books don’t. I noticed the same phenomenon in the advertising for the Kindle when writing the term paper for my media theory seminar. I won’t get into too much detail here. What is important is that, in transitional periods, media strive to look and act like those that they replace, even as they offer new features. In switching from a record to cassette to CD to mp3, for example, users must be convinced that their music won’t fundamentally change (which is never possible, as many record enthusiasts will remind us), but rather that they will gain conveniences, such as portability. In the case of the iPad and e-readers, the most salient benefit of e-books is that they offer to connect the individual reader to a vast (and growing) digital archive. Books can be downloaded almost instantly, words and phrases may be researched in online dictionaries and encyclopedias (especially Wikipedia, which is a fascinating creature of its own). In short, though the reader of the e-book is still physically atomized, he or she is digitally connected to a worldwide network of readers.

I have just breathlessly (unforgivably, perhaps) summarized my media-theoretical/material perspective of transitions in reading culture. It allows me, though, to loop back to the “Slow Reading” article I cited in the Guardian on Monday. In the article, author Henry Hitchings offers an interesting theory as to how the internet changes one’s sense of self, and I think that this offers a really interesting way into thinking about reading on the Internet and e-readers:

Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. “It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming,” Hitchings says, “and it fragments our attention span in a way that’s not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa.” He also argues that “the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one’s sense of self, one’s capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard”.

While I might agree with Hitching’s argument that the Internet accustoms us to a new epistemology, I don’t fully buy his proposition that the “internet erodes, slowly, one’s sense of self.” In many ways I think the Internet helps us form a sense of self, as we are able to connect to digital communities–especially things like forums and blogs–which stimulate interests that might have otherwise been unexplored. Furthermore, the slow takeover of the Internet by social media sites (I have a sneaking suspicion that Facebook will be releasing an Internet browser one of these days), as well as the host of customization options that the Internet and Internet browsers offer, means that everyone’s perception of the Internet is a personal one. To be sure, we perceive of ourselves as atomized, physically distinct individuals when we surf the Internet, and it offers a certain brand of anonymity that can be powerfully dangerous, but I’m not sure I completely agree that it “erodes” our sense of self.

Pressing on with Hitching’s argument, I disagree more with his proposition that the Internet erodes our “capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has.” I accept his implicit argument that reading on the Internet is inherently in conversation with others, rather than an exercise in isolation. But in relegating the “pleasure” of reading to its “isolation,” Hitchings ignores that intertextuality and criticism can offer pleasures of their own that don’t necessarily impinge upon the reading process.

Continuing with our thought experiment, what might change when we read The Canterbury Tales on an e-reader (particularly, one with Internet access)? There are many answers to this question; I’ll start from an academic standpoint: I believe that reading a text on the same medium from which one could access other books, and indeed critical material, could help us to read intertextually and to bring literature and criticism into greater conversation. One might point out that critical editions, replete with accompanying essays, have been doing this already. These are limited and canonized, however; the possibilities of the Internet open up countless more possibilities to draw lines between more unconventional pairings (one might not find a queer reading of Chaucer in such a canonized anthology, but with the Internet one simply needs to look for one).

Especially in an era that demands that scholarship originate, if not end up, on a digital platform, it is interesting that the same medium could be used for the reading, research and writing of a paper. Rather than consulting physically distinct media–investigating a photograph before turning to a book or a newspaper, for instance–a researcher might do all research and writing on a single device.

There are material tradeoffs here. In the limit-case in which a digital device conveys all media (movies, music, newspapers etc.), differences between media cease to become important in tactile terms, and the idea of printed media in particular begins to become an abstraction. The material/cultural/sociopolitical/economic meaning of a ‘newspaper’ or ‘journal’ might (and arguably already has) shift as the Internet offers almost equal access to each of these media and we cease to use them in their printed forms.

Unlike the conservatives lamenting the end of the printed age, I look forward to these changes with an eager curiosity. To be sure, I’ll still make time to cuddle with my favorite novels. But even as I stress my material relationship with books, I am startlingly aware of my bond with my laptop. It inexplicably broke a little over a week ago, and when I finally got it back last night, it was a happy reunion (cue a montage of me and my laptop visiting all of our favorite spots, like the Starbucks I’m sitting in right now). Perhaps someday people will stubbornly refuse to give up their dogeared laptops for some device of the future. We can only imagine.