Profound Heterogeneity

0 Near the end of the film Fight Club, the narrator, played by Edward Norton, reveals the crucial narrative conceit of the film. Addressing the audience, explaining the rather abrupt narrative shift, Norton says, “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.” What he is referring to is the now technologically outdated process whereby a projectionist would seamlessly transition from one reel of film to another, flipping between projectors in such a manner as to hide from the audience the fact that a change had occurred. The idea is that no one in the audience realizes that a transition between reels has taken place because the continuity of the narrative is preserved. But at this particular point in Fight Club, one of these “changeovers” takes place, and we realize, in part because Norton highlights its occurrence, that the transition has not been so smooth, so easily executed. Whether by narrative intervention, technological, glitch, or human error some “changeovers” are easier to recognize. There are some changeovers, though, which are so jarring, that understanding the event as continuous becomes increasingly difficult, where the transference is anything but smooth. It is as if one is watching the latest Michael Bay action flick, only to suddenly feel as if you are in a Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy.

0 We are, historically speaking, at, I would like to suggest, one of those changeovers, whereby it is becoming increasingly clear that the current moment does not fit so seamlessly with the prior. This changeover is simultaneously technological (our means storing and transmitting knowledge and information) and narrative (the means and metaphors by which we come to frame our knowledge). Fundamental principles which have shaped how we organize, create, and disseminate knowledge are being transformed. Knowledge and information which for an extended period of time have relied on analog substructures for their transmission are no longer necessarily defined by the need to be rendered in ink on dead trees. They exceed that substructure in two key ways: first, the sheer volume of the information and knowledge produced necessitates a move beyond the analog, as there is not enough paper or ink (to say nothing of space) to render it all as data. Second, the nature of the information itself often exceeds the ability of the analog to manifest it. It is difficult to render a hyperlink in print (it can perhaps crudely be done in the form of a footnote) and more difficult, nearly impossible, to print out a digital game. I say this to suggest that we are at the end of, approaching the threshold, have already begun the changeover from analog to digital.

0 I say this not to repeat or add my voice to the number of people who herald the “death of the book,” or the “death of print,” as much as I will often jokingly invoke those monikers. It is much more complicated than this. For me, arriving at a changeover is much more complicated. What is required are not simplistic iterations of the so overplayed “this will kill that,” but rather a more careful approach to understanding how this transitions into that, or how this changeovers into that. For as the image above suggests, changeovers are always occurring, have always occurred, and they happen frequently without anyone noting their occurrence. But the changeover from digital to analog is a substantial one, one that I believe is so significant that it is worth paying specific attention to, lest we become confused by the transition.

0 One of the characteristics of the changeover that make it so complex and substantial is that even narrating a paradigm shift from analog to digital does not sufficiently describe it. The shift crucially includes a move away from analog to both the digital and the network, for it is the sum of the characteristics of these concepts that bring about the current change we find ourselves experiencing. We could have a digital informational substructure which was not networked—imagine separate computers where transferring information was a matter of carrying around CDs or flash drives (something akin to the early days of personal computing where most information was stored and transferred by floppy disk). Or it is possible to imagine a networked world separate from the digital. Both would look substantially different than the world we currently inhabit. Indeed, in many respects, as many have come to argue in the last ten years, we have always had a networked world, a world of connections, that we are just now becoming able to see. Railroads, telegraphs, and social connections are networks, even if we have not always thought of them this way. It is only by understanding the changeover as the total of a change brought about by the transfers of the digital enhanced by the multiplication of our networks that we can approach understanding it in all of its complexity.

0 We could continue to talk of this changeover as the closing or end of the Gutenberg Galaxy, as many have done. But I prefer to think in terms of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” an idea I borrow from Thomas Pettitt (footnote). Pettitt’s terminology suggests that the Gutenberg Galaxy, the one shaped by the rise of printing press culture, is actually, relatively speaking, a rather short moment in the history of recording and sharing knowledge and information, a parathensis which was opened in the 1450s with the Gutenberg Bible, developed over the next two hundred years with the establishment of the laws and discourses that come to define how we treated knowledge in these years, and brought to a close in 1994 with the development of web browsers and the rise of the the publicly accessible web. The term parenthesis both emphasizes the brevity of the print era and draws attention to the fact that it was historically constructed. Whereas galaxy seems to have the import of a force of nature, powerful and pre-determined, the piece of punctuation that is the parenthesis marks the historically limited and socially created nature of printing press culture.

0 In many ways, I would suggest, we are still caught in that closing parentheses, already invested in the digital network, but still heavily influenced by the years of discourse about knowledge and information that could only be produced in an analog world. Our libraries, even as they branch out and connect to the ever-growing digital network, still see as their primary purpose the collection of analog artifacts, mostly books, for storage, retrieval, and dissemination. Being published in a book is still the criterion for being an “expert”; I am required by law to hand out paper copies of my syllabi. It is because we have one foot in each substructure, partially analog, leaning towards the digital, that I find this moment to be crucially important. In the same way that the first hundred to two hundred years of printing press culture in Europe saw the creation of many of the things we now take to be “natural” about book-based analog knowledge—from the seemingly mundane but technologically significant (chapters, indexes, and page numbers) to the large legal and institutional frameworks which support print culture (copyright, libraries, universities)—the initial years of the digital network will in a large part shape what occurs in the next moment, whether it turns out to be a digital galaxy or another parenthesis. Choices we make now, in particular about how we handle the transition from the analog to the digital network, will have profound affects on the way this new substructure develops. There is nothing natural about either analog culture or digital culture, which is why it is crucial to understand the degree to which analog culture structures our perceptions of the world, and to not let those biases overdetermine the decisions we make at this moment about the emerging digital networked paradigm.

0 I think here in particular about the much debated, at least by the popular media, question “Does the Internet Make You Stupid?” On one side of the argument, to be a bit reductive, are critics such as Nicholas Carr who argue that a digital network so alters reading practices that this changeover threatens to substantially undermine how we think, down to the level of physically altering the way neurological pathways in the brain are constructed. On the other side of the argument are critics such as Clay Shirky, who contend that the internet allows people to connect in effortless (or almost effortless) ways that substantially lower the cost of collaboration, making us effectively smarter. Of course, the rather obvious alternative answer to this question, one which the media for the most part tends to ignore, is something more subtle and nuanced: it depends. At Scott Rosenberg observed in response to one of the recent discussions about the effect of the internet on human intelligence, “you should be asking, “Am I using the Internet to make myself smarter or dumber?” Then fix it if you chose door #2.” In other words, the internet can make one smarter but only only if used “correctly.” What this correctly is, is the tricky and more important debate.

0 I make this qualification not to align myself with the humanists who argue that we can wholly determine how we use the technology—that humans have the power to decide how we use technology, and must simply figure out how to do it ethically and effectively. McLuhan has already explained why this is the position of a Narcissist who is “hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technological form.” For as much as I disagree with the likes of Carr, it is important to recognize that we are not fully in control of these technologies. These technologies shape us as much during a changeover as we shape them; the task for humans involves negotiating the terms of this shaping rather than determining how it is to happen.

0 If we are at a crucial moment in the changeover, and must choose what and how to negotiate, then the terms that we use to do so will have substantial and far reaching effects. Now, with one foot in the digital and one foot in the analog, is the moment in which we will make substantial choices the moment in which this new substructure becomes our grounding. Some of these decisions have already been made, with the underlying architecture of the internet already being decided. The TCP/IP protocol and packet switching for instance determine a great deal about how information travels on the network. The current legal battle over network neutrality will likely effect how the internet is used for many subsequent generations, and our choice to concentrate our social interactions on corporate sites such as Facebook (rather than have individuals control these interactions) likely has social consequences we have yet to fully realize. The legal codes and cultural norms we establish during this transformation will, in a short time, unseat the “naturalness” of print culture and replace it with the “naturalness” of the digital. What precisely that “naturalness” will be, still has yet to be established.

0 So, in this sense it is how we choose to use the internet that matters; Rosenberg is right, but with the caveat that the choices are not fully up to us, the digital network allows us only so many choices, so many ways to use it. Rather than seeing the choices about the effects of the digital network as fully under our control it is perhaps more accurate to think of this changeover as a negotiation. The technical structure of the digital network is entirely different from print culture, and obviously affords certain opportunities, but the architecture is not completely liberating, it forecloses paths which the analog relies upon. And as I suggested above these negotiations often happen on multiple levels, technological, legal, and cultural. As the support structure for this information and knowledge changes over from the analog to the digital, so to will many of our historically derived prejudices. Institutions which at their core are librocentric will undergo substantial, if not revolutionary change, their future formations looking radically different from their present configurations.