And So On and So Forth

Thesis V

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized

only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be

recognized and is never seen again. "The truth will not run away

from us": in the historical outlook of historicism these words of

Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism

cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is

not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens

to disappear irretrievably. 

-from Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History 

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It is this excerpt from Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History that struck me the most. Thinking about it in terms of my own research on the past, present and future of language, the past is almost always referenced in the present. If only for a second, we can see a glimpse of the past in the present. This is almost always the case in regards to any subject, isn't it? How can there even be a present of something without its past? If something had no past tense, there wouldn't be a present tense of it either; it would just be. In order to have these distinct tenses, one tense must come before another tense. This is the logic of history; recedings and proceedings. All of Language, now and forever in the future, is based on the past and the established system that was created for language at that one point in history. From the moment the first sound was spoken. Then the first word. Then the first sentence. Then the moment an alphabet was created. Then the first written language. And so on and so forth. Without the past, there is no present. It's as simple as that. We only know of the past by which we see of it in the present and what we can foresee of it in the future.

The Promise of Digital Books

The first thing that Mod says at the beginning of his discussion is that in order to think about the future of the book, we have to think about the future of all content and the connections between the platforms where the content is published.

Two features of the future book defined by Mod, which I found most intriguing, were the authorial shift and the artificiality that takes place in the digital format.

Mod explains that digital books can be constantly updated in real-time. Time itself becomes an active ingredient in authorship, he says. Mod uses Wikipedia as an example of this. Wikipedia is a collaborative form of authorship and it is continuously evolving.

Books on the other hand, have more of a sense of permanence. The words are embedded in the paper, unchangeable once the book is printed. What exists on the pages today will remain there tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Books are reliable.

Does this mean that digital books are unreliable? Mod says once the format changes from print to digital, the books become artificial. Books in the digital format may only exist that way for an instance because they can constantly be updated.

The most memorable claim that Mod makes towards the end is that Digital has more of a promise of shared experiences. This is not to say that printed books do not allow for shared experiences, but the possibilities are greater with digital.

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