The Resurrection of the Printed Book

Kenneth Goldsmith proclaims in The Artful Accidents of Google Books that "the book is far from dead: it's returning in forms that few could ever have imagined." The Art of Google Books, a Tumblr that collects strange and unusual errors found in the Google Books Archive, is just one of many examples Goldsmith highlights where these technological errors in systems take on new aesthetic forms.

The many examples of projects created on the basis of these errors was really captivating for me. Why are these errors so interesting? Is it because we think technology is never supposed to mess up? Or because we often confide in technology as if it is a more accurate depiction of life than reality itself? These were just a few questions I asked myself when reading Goldsmith's article and looking through the projects he describes.

Goldsmith suggests that the obsession with digital errors comes from the sense that these errors are on record and that they are permanent. For example, at such a massive scale of scans, Google is never going to go back and fix these errors because there are too many of them in Google Books. It would simply be impossible to do so and therefore, the errors will remain there, waiting for someone to find them like a new age scavenger hunt.

I think what is most interesting about these digital errors though is that they only exist the moment when technology and humanity intersect.

Must Speak Internet

How can one determine what the language of the present is? In order to know what exactly is the language of the present, isn’t only necessary to look at the language of the past? Let’s face it, no one talks like Shakespeare today. But is this a good or bad thing? Have we downgraded? I feel as though a major cause of the shift in our use of language today was the Internet. Is the internet then the root of our degradation of language?

There was a point starting in the late 90s when the internet was gaining popularity that it was the trend to shorten and abbreviate everything. Internet slang was developed to ease communication, but has it really? I guess it was faster to type ’ ur’ rather than ‘your.’ But with the fastness and easiness of this new slang comes consequences. These consequences are the loss of grammatical rule. Although it is still the trend to shorten words, I think people are beginning to revive the grammar part of language again. I feel like abbreviations and shortened words are less seen than when the Internet first began. I will openly admit that I still use ‘lol’ on a daily basis even when I am not even physically laughing. Some of this Internet slang that is now inherited in the generations around it may never go away.

I am speaking about language in relationship with the internet because that is where I believe language is the most dominant these days and there is many areas of the internet where this is proven. Just look at the hashtag phenomenon. People hashtag complete phrases today. The hash symbol was often used in information technology to highlight a special meaning. Look how the symbol has evolved.  Completely going against what the hash was originally used for, people now hashtag anything and everything. How can this function in the organization system that hashtags were intended for? Is there a limit to how much we can hashtag? Will this system of organization end in a complete chasm in internet databases?

I believe language is more cultural today than at any other periods throughout history. In order to truly understand the language of a specific culture, one must adopt or be conscious of their cultural surroundings. If you do not keep up with viral videos, memes, images, news, etc. surrounding social media than you my not understand what people are talking about. These forces of social media are what give cultural events importance. Social media is really what drives present day language.

How Much is Too Much?

In James Gleick's article "After the Flood," he reflects on real and imagined libraries. Wikipedia is one of these so called imagined libraries. When I think of a traditional print-based library compared to Wikipedia I think of something that is definitive versus something that is infinitive.Wikipedia is a platform which can constantly be updated and changed and added to. Wikipedia has no limits in quantitative terms since now we are able to store anything  and everything in the "cloud," but a traditional printed encyclopedia has a certain amount of pages, a definitive beginning and end. Although the two platforms are similar in regards to the quality of what constitutes an entry, traditional library is a resource for printed archival information which has been carefully selected by experts as opposed to wikipedia which is a place for shared knowledge with contributors from all walks of life. Not only are people taking in knowledge on Wikipedia, but participating in the creation of it as well. Another thing that sets Wikipedia apart from traditional printed archives is the entries that exist. Wikipedia includes entries just about anything where as traditional encyclopedias, for instance, are more selective in terms of entries. I feel like Wikipedia is geared more towards the "everyman" so to speak where traditional archives are geared more towards people in the realm of academia.

The Great Shift

Shift:

verb (used with object)

1. to put (something) aside and replace it by another or others; change or exchange: to shift friends; to shift ideas.

2. to transfer from one place, position, person, etc., to another: to shift the blame onto someone else.

3. Automotive. to change (gears) from one ratio or arrangement to another.

4. Linguistics . to change in a systematic way, especially phonetically.

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This word, for me, is significant in order to comprehend what exactly is happening in the “digital age” that we are in. A shift of property, a shift of information, a shift of interfaces, a shift of roles and a shift in relationships. These great shifts are the basis for what Sean Dockray argues in Interface, Access, Loss from the book Undoing Property. Dockray first mentions the notion of “the cloud.” An existential entity that holds all of our “stuff.” Sounds so mystical when you say it, THE CLOUD….  It’s forever infinite, hovering above us? (yeah, right). Quite contrary. In reality, it’s like a factory. A factory of servers and wires. This is one shift that Dockray talks about. The shift from the modern industrial factory to this factory in the clouds, so to speak.

What goes hand in hand with this shift is the shift in property. Our “stuff” is no longer physical, but metaphysical. The stuff we own in this cloud is not even technically ours. This brings up questions and concerns with the notion of ownership. As Dockray states, “What is less recognized—because it is still very much in process—is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the individual and common kind. What follows is a story of “the cloud,” the post-dot-com bubble techno super-entity, which sucks up property, labor, and free time.”

Another interesting thing that Dockray brings up is the shift of relationships in the digital realm. There is a shift of how we interact with the “thing,” how others interact with us through it, and of course how we interact with the world. As Dockray puts it, things have been reduced in a sense to inputs and outputs. Our roles as users has changed drastically.

“Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people, institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to the demands of networked computation (not to mention the often contradictory demands of business, government, or collective desire); and the expanding field of objects encompasses exactly those entities integrated into such a network.”

Antisocial Media

The container concept “social media,” describing a fuzzy collection of websites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia, is not a nostalgic project aimed at reviving the once dangerous potential of “the social,” like an angry mob that demands the end of economic inequality. Instead, the social—to remain inside Baudrillard’s vocabulary—is reanimated as a simulacrum of its own ability to create meaningful and lasting social relations.

I found the above excerpt from the article What Is the Social in Social Media? by Geert Lovink to be very interesting with the way social media is perceived as a simulacrum. In its simplest form, a simulacrum is a representation of something else, a copy of the real. This got me thinking. Is social media, then, a representation of real life? Or are we as a society trying to make social media simulate life so that is more comprehendible for us? I suppose the word social has a different meaning when it is combined with the word media. Social media has a new set of structures different then the structures we associate with the term social in real life. Social media changes relationships, roles and class structures in society. It is hard to comprehend a new definition for social than the one we already know. So, what does this mean for future generations?

The Revolution has arrived

“Or to put it another way: we are at the end of the beginning of the digital revolution.”

When I read this statement from Nancy Levinson, it dawned on me that we are in a revolution. I didn’t really think about referring this print and pixel phenomenon as a revolution before, but it is. The first part of the revolution is over. The question of preference between print and digital is already irrelevant. It is outdated. This notion was one that was interesting to me as I was reading Print and Pixel. This “revolution” impacts every aspect of our lives.

One notion from the article that I found problematic was what Levinson mentioned about copyright laws. This is a topic that I am very curious about. How is it possible to control copyrights with digital information? How could we possibly regulate this flow of content in the digital world?

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.