BAKER: Our walls are covered with books, of course. Gutenberg books. Not medieval manuscripts. Not Greek parchments. Not Egyptian papyri. When Bill Gates puffs the Information Age, he is too limited in historical vision, perhaps, to see that he is talking relatively. The Information Age brought into being by Gutenberg's books still predominates. Who can measure whether the impact of the fifteenth century revolution was and is greater than that which is being attributed to the electronic technologies of today? Whatever the measurement, it is a fact that what we think we know is still largely a consequence of our encountering it in books.
CHARLIE: True enough of people of our generation. The younger the person today, the less true it is. Increasingly, the electronic environment nourishes the mind.
ABLE: "Nourishes" demands a look at the issue of quality but not for the moment. The point here is that the electronic environment cannot sustain the weight of the cultural inheritance, of the sense of sanity--our connectedness to the solid base of knowledge. It is unlikely to do be able to do that in the foreseeable future. The bookish foundation of the culture simply will stay intact because it must. The electronic alternative is...virtual, not real.
BAKER: Calculations of cultural change in the midst of cultural change are dependable in only one way: they prove to be innacurate. That's not a reason not to try to calculate. It's just a statement of the dilemma in this discussion. Whatever the degree of influence of the electronic environment on the culture of the book, we know that it is having SOME effect. Birkerts did not write about NOTHING in his elegies for the Gutenberg era. The likelihood is that we are seeing the operation of a McLuhanesque principle: the old medium is becoming the content of the new medium. That is, the book is not dying; it is turning into something else in a new relationship with the electronic environment. Our task here is not to look upon this moralistically or nostalgically--as Birkerts seems to do. It is our task merely to analyze the duality confronting us and to derive from analysis whatever functional insight we can. "Functional" might veer into the evaluative; but let that be as it may.
CHARLIE: We need to begin with the realization that books now routinely have a PRIOR existence as electronic text! Think of the meaning of that. George Landow brings this to our attention.
ABLE: It may mean only that personal computers are better typewriters than typewriters.
BAKER: Ah, surely they are more than that. When you have a text in electronic form, it has potential lives unavailable to the fixed thing it will become when transformed into ink on paper between covers.
CHARLIE: Above all, it will be PENETRABLE, MOVABLE, CONNECTIBLE. It will be transportable in a faster and far-reaching medium. Mainly, IT NEED NOT COME TO AN END!
BAKER: That is a key difference. The difference has to do with the underlying assumption we make about the nature of knowledge. A book must come to a physical end. It lives on our shelf, discrete, total. We come to think that the conclusion reached is a real conclusion. But the history of thought surely shows that every conclusion in every book is a false stop, imposed by the nature of paper and ink and presses. Thought keeps on going. Books by their closedness distort that human fact. For hundreds of years they have given us an illusion of definitiveness, finality, authoritativeness.
CHARLIE: Hypertext in the electronic environment does not artificially close off thought. The form of it is continuous, like thought itself.
ABLE: It appears that we may think in terms of the technology we use.
CHARLIE: Yes! At least we think we do! Electronic technologies bring us closer to the patterns of behavior that seem to be natural. We may be headed for a monumental irony: the book, that oh-so-solid-seeming brick of thought, could become the virtual reality and the virtuality of the electronic medium could become the real thing of thought.
BAKER: We need to dig into the the deeper structure of theory at this point. In the high modern, where the book is supreme, we see a totalizing direction. Let's say that the totalizing direction of modernism--the tendency toward exclusive hegemony--gained its legitimacy via the book. We observe a contradiction in this: the book, by its physical nature, is incapable of continuation to the outer borders. It is a limited instrument that starts where one before it stopped, and another will have to start after it stops. The form of the book, in short, seems out of keeping with the effects of the book culture in modernist life--the effect of totalization, the universalization of authority.
ABLE: Yes, and this contrasts nicely with the postmodern condition. Now we have an electronic environment capable of an almost seamless connectivity, unlimited by political or natural boundaries. But the postmodern critique of modernism has produced a social setting the oppostie of "seamlessness." Each "Other" now is capable of some legitimation; "metanarratives" accounting for everything worth accounting for are discredited. And so we have a landscape of fragmentation. Vide the former Soviet Union or the former Yugoslavia. Vide the streets of Philadelphia, for that matter. So we have a reversal of the media and the social reality from that of the high modern. The media in each seems incompatible with the outcome produced.
CHARLIE: Accept for argument's sake that the postmodern condition is unstable and problematical. Accept that it is something to work through, or out of, for the sake of a better moral and social calculus. Then, if we look at the tendency of the technology at work in the fragmented, disoriented postmodern condition, we may see a process by which betterment will come.
ABLE: Highly unlikely.
BAKER: Yet plausible. There is a universalizing potential in the technology. It is operating with social material defined by the postmodern theory as textual and unhegemonic, unrooted in a single source. If the technology sustains its power to transform, it will absorb the postmodern social condition and thus change it from what it is to "content." When it becomes content in the technological medium, it ceases to have the teeth of authenticity, the very teeth that are biting at our skin..
CHARLIE: Does this then lead to a new hegemony, with all the negatives that that suggests?
BAKER: Good question. It would be the hegemony of the border, of the edges, rather than of the center. It would be the hegemony of the rhizome, not of the tree. It would lack symmetry. It would have an intrinsic way of reaching to the next edge, and then keep on going. There would be no Big Brother, that demon of early tv. But we don't know. We can feel justified, however, in looking to the technology itself as a possible means of movement away from the fundamental problem of the postmodern.
ABLE: The fundamental problem?
BAKER: Yes: the schizophrenic use of cultural fragments in place of consistent, solid meaning in a consensual community.
ABLE: This begins to sound utopian, another form of terror.
CHARLIE: Not at all. We are trying to imagine into being a state of affairs that the world never saw before. It need not be thought of as perfect for us to think it could be better than the present--if the present in fact needs significant adjusting.
ABLE: The coffee is hot, and the fire feels good. There's an unfinished book on the table, begging to be read. Can Utopia wait?