[iDC] The Book to Come

[Gere, Charlie]

I found the thread 'Media dies slowly than some would like' most
stimulating and interesting, but some of the discussion was perhaps a
little teleological and made presumptions about the ends of certain
media such as traditional print-and-paper books and their supersession
by others such as e-books, while I believe the situation to be far more
complex, and so I would be interested in discussing the question of the
'book to come', following on from Derrida's insights into the continued
existence and ongoing transformations of the book as object and idea in
the context of media developments such as the Web and Web 2.0.

Amazon's Kindle has, in rather *literal* manner, made the question of
the future of the book more pressing, but is in some ways a less radical
development than other less book-like manifestations of discourse in the
age of Web 2.0 such as blogs, wikis, and lists such as this one. What
interests me in particular is how these forms of media transform our
conception of the traditional book rather than the perhaps less
interesting question of one kind of technical platform superseding
another.

I am also interested in what it means to work in a context such as a
traditional university, in which the book as traditional understood
remains the standard model for the storage, representation, and
distribution of academic discourse at a time when the book itself and
all it has stood for is being radically mutated by new social, cultural,
economic and political arrangements intimately bound up with new
technologies and new media. Bound up with this is the relation between
forms such as the book as traditionally conceived and our conceptions of
subjectivity and agency.

Thus, to put it in a nutshell, what interests me is not so much new
technical forms of the book but what is happening to the book even if it
appears to be much the same object as before.

To quote N. Katherine Hayles from How We Became Posthuman

'A book produced by typesetting may look very similar to one generated
by a computerized program, but the technological processes involved in
this transformation are not neutral. Different technologies of text
production suggest different modes of signification; changes in
signification are linked with shifts in consumption; shifting patterns
of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment; and embodied
experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds
of textual worlds. In fact each category - production, signification,
consumption, bodily experience, and representation - is in constant
feedback and feedforward loops with the others'.

I intend this to be the theme of an MA module I am running here at
Lancaster on Critical Media Practice, which I hope will get the students
not just to think about this but actively engage in producing their own
examples of what the book might look like in this context, whether this
means transformations in the printed object or the emergence of new
kinds of 'book' in forms other than paper and print. Of course this is
not a new topic, but one that has been discussed since the 1960s, not
least with Derrida's On Grammatology, which proclaimed 'the end of the
book and the beginning of writing' (which did not mean the end of the
book in a literal sense).

Starting a thread on this list is not only an opportunity to initiate
discussion of this topic and to solicit ideas and opinions from people
directly involved with these issues, but also a chance to engage
performatively with the list form itself as the means for a new type of
discourse made possible by new media, that is taking over some of the
roles previously occupied in very different ways and at different
rhythms and velocities by print publications, particularly in relation
to debate and discussion.


Charlie Gere 
Head of Department
Institute for Cultural Research 
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: c.gere at lancaster.ac.uk
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php