Burning the Boats/Books

For the past 400 years, give or take 100, knowledge has primarly been structured by the codex form. Since the inviting of the printing press rules, customs, laws, and social practices have become organized around the idea that a book is the ideal medium for delivering content. The digital network alters this, or at least in theory ought to alter this. The existence of the digital networked archive reveals as historical many of the principles analog culture treats as natural. Nowhere is this perhaps more clear than in the world of academia, where being a published author serves as proof of expertise, and tenure decisions (especially within the humanities) revolve around being the author of a published book. Indeed the phenomnen is so common that an academic’s first book is often referred to as the “tenure book,” an object produced with the aim of acquiring tenure.

It is all too easy to forget that the alliance of academic publishing and the academy is a rather recent historical developement, so that we should not all be surprised that like many seemingly ageless print institutions, academic publishing is at least substantially chaning, some might argue even threatned by the digital networked substructure. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick has correctly pointed out, “we need to rethink, in a broad sense, the relationship between old media and new, and ask what that relationship bodes for the academy.” As others have suggested the pressures on academic publishing, driven primarly by market forces, but not limited to the economic by any means, have for sometime been a substantial conversation within the academy, again especially within the humanities where the decline of the book seems to be most substantially felt. But this is not a project about the “death of books,” or not directly at least. Rather this a project which will try to practice the “death of books,” or at least the death of librocentricism.

A brief story to explain . . .

In April of 2010 I gave a talk to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, titled “Burn the Boats/Books.” The title for this talk came from an interviewer about the future of news publishing Marc Andreessen gave earlier in the year. Asked about what print journalism ought to do in the age of the web he responded “you gotta burn the boats, you gotta commit.” What Andreessen was refering to, was the somewhat approcryphal story of Cortze landing in Mexico. Fleeing from Cuba, Cortze, or so the story goes, had his men set the ships on fire removing the possiblity of ever returning from whence they came. The only possiblity was to go full force into the unkown. Andreessen was leveraging this story as a way to argue that journalist ought to shut down their print operations and fully commit to using the web to distribute their content. His point is that an organization cannot continue to defend dead ground, and that the only option is to direct one’s efforts towards the new landscape. Evolve or die. Be online or be irrelevant.

The point of my talk was to argue that academics ought to adopt Andreessen’s position, and transform our mode of knowledge transmission, fully adopting the digital, abandon the analog. In short, we ought to “Burn our Boats.” I say this not to encourage book burning, anything but. Yes, I was, still am, in part being provcative, but I was also, still am, being genuine when I argue that as a profession academics would have a great deal to gain by overcoming our print biases. That in order to remain relevant in the coming moments academics could benefit from giving up on their fetishization of the book, and instead start imagining what knowledge would look like when it is not designed to end up in books. We ought to get over our obsession with books, treating them as essential to what we do, for they are not.

Outside of academia, while published authors might still garner a certain amount of social cache, I think we are discovering more and more public conversations and discourse are being driven by content that is created and distributed online, content which at least initially is not designed to end up in a book. To make a general argument, which is at least partially true: knowledge is no longer print based, nor governed by the substrate of paper, indeed while in many ways me might continue to harbor these librocentric biases, as we move away from structuring knowledge to end up on dead trees these framing structures will prove less and less necessary. Indeed may actually impede on our ability to participate in knowledge conversations.

I am not saying that we should whole sale give up on books, actually perform a book burning to free ourselves from all the academic pages which have accmulated around various instittuions, but rather somethign slightly different, we should start conceving of our scholarship as if it will not end up in books. It sill might, but we should start by asking ourselves, what would scholarship look like if it were not designed to end up in books.

What Would Scholarship Look Like If It Were Not Designed to End Up in Books?

Honestly I am not certain what the answer to that question is, and orginally I thought I would write a book about that question. But this seemed problematic to me for two reasons: 1. Writing a book about the limitations of the book seems like an odd task. 2. A substantial amount of scholarship by critics whose work I respect has and is being done in this field. Instead, it struck me as important to actually produce one of these projects, to begin to imagine what scholarship might look like when it is not designed with an analog output as the end goal. I think there have been some promising projects in this regard, and based on those I felt encouraged to actually, burn my own boats, and produce scholarship designed to leverage the digital network, to expireminet with what is possible when one sheds the librocentric bias.

Rather than write about writing in the age of the digital, I am working on the other topic which intrests me (for a full explanation of what that is read the introduction). This project is divided into two parts, the first is the nodes and the second is parallel process. The Nodes house the longer writings, essays, and critiques. I have called them nodes as opposed to chapters because I ultimately imagine them being arranged in a substantially different way than chapters in book. Currently The Nodes levearge commentpress in order to allow paragraph level conversation about the content. Parallel Process is the ongoing commentary about both the writing process, and the subject matter, for posting shorter ongoing conversation. For now I plan to organize this as a rather traditional blog.

Both sections are an attempt to perform both the process and product in a public way. In academia I think we are often accustomed to only showing the final product of our work, the confines of the analog medium have really necessitated this. But one thing the digital network allows is the sharing of a work in process, publicly showing the drafts,  in reductive terms, thinking out loud. Even more substantially though, I think one of the principles of the web is it reveals that knowledge itself is a process not a product, something we can perhaps be forgiven for not recognizing, but now that we have the tools it is perhaps time to take steps towards the process over product model.

As Tom Scheinfeldt recently observed in reference to a San Francisco Chronicle article, “Tired of hearing the book is a “perfect product.” Once upon a time, the horse was a perfect mode of transportation.”  I think it is time that we stage a burning, and move forward. This is one attempt to do so.

David Parry
Assistant Professor of Emerging Media
University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.outsidethetext.com