The Proustian Insight in the Digital Age

“And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? . . .
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.”
-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Thus runs the ‘madeleine’ episode of one of literature’s most beloved semi-autobiographical accounts, Remembrance of Things Past. The taste of the Madeleine, otherwise ordinary, becomes fundamental to the experience of the narrator, because it brings him back to his childhood, and thus begins a process of memory that lasts throughout seven volumes. The beauty of the Madeleine lay not in its own taste ‘for its own sake,’ but in the particular associations it had with regard to the narrator’s life.

I had a similar experience today.

I was sitting down on the sofa of my dorm room, talking with my roommate. It must’ve been about 5.30 in the afternoon. I had just gotten back from work, and, having slept a little over two hours yesterday, I was bound for sleep and weary—much like the narrator in the passage above. Though I wanted to sleep, I knew that to take a nap at this time would have been quite a wrong choice. I had a meeting an hour from now, and other such engagements. So simply resting in the sofa would have to do for now.

I then see something—a metallic, technological-looking object—peeking out from under the couch pillow. It looks like an iPod (I can tell because I see the “hold” button at the top). I wearily extend my hand and pick up the object, and find that it is indeed, and iPod. And when I mean iPod, I do not mean an iPhone, or an iTouch. I mean the original, white iPod—the one that had the “play” button above the little turning-wheel-thingy. By God, I thought, I hadn’t seen this in so long. And it was so rusty—I could see how Time had done its work on this little critter.

Wondering if this thing still showed signs of life, I pressed the “play” button to see if it would come on. Indeed, it did—and suddenly I saw the iPod screen of long-ago. It is black-and-white, backlit. Look at it. It looks so rudimentary compared to our gorgeous iPhones.
But the Proustian moment came when I put my hand on the wheel and started browsing. I heard the “click-click-click” of the cursor as it went through items in the menu. I started spinning the wheels all around, and continued hearing it: clickity clickity clickity clickity… And it was that auditory input which spun me round into a Proustian moment of contemplation—into the feeling of “exquisite pleasure” which brought forth “the visual memory linked to the taste” of the iPod’s clicks. That is, it brought me to my freshman year of High School, on my bed at midnight, listening to the Beatles as I scrolled down the iPod’s menus looking for the next song I’d listen to; it reminded me of that first iPod I had at my home, welcome to our home like a magic lamp. We only had one, so my brother and I shared it … and on, and on, and on. Read the passage from Proust to understand just how I felt.

After the initial ecstatic moment, when some time had passed, I began to think about other technological relics. I thought about the original Game Boy, and its four-bit sounds (Mario bleeping into a giant size; the beep-beeps forming music; the little squares that formed drawings that jumped up and down, and on and on)… And I thought of just how short-lived these new technological objects are. I remember how in the span of a couple of years, we went from the Game Boy to the small Game Boy, from that to the Game Boy color, from the Game Boy Color to the rectangle Game Boy thing, and from that to the Nintendo DS, and on and on. Similarly, iPods suffer such that in the span of three to five years, an iPod can feel as antique as a fifty year-old book.

Which gets me to the subject of e-readers. The Amazon Kindle is already starting to look old-dated in the light of the iPad—and five years from now, the Kindle will most probably be lying under the couches of technological progress, waiting to be contemplated as an artifact—a moment of time lost. The broken Kindle will be just that—a broken Kindle. But to the reader who tagged along with it, it will bring forth a great number of memories, that the reader will surely treasure. But the hundred-year old book can offer another pleasure: that is, while being still an artifact, it can still perform its original function. That is, it still has a story to tell. What story does the outdated, forgotten technological object tell? Maybe Proust can help us:

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

-Remembrance of Things Past

"No Times At All, Just The New York Times"

A) Hello, Blogdom!

B) This post serves as an adjunct to Lesley’s earlier post on “The Experience of Reading” and Kerry’s “The Price We Pay.” And perhaps I echo Keaton's fear.

I love to read the New York Times. More so, I love to read American newspapers. Not only because they give me exciting stories about the world, but because I pride myself in knowing the technique of reading them. As anybody knows, if you don’t hold the newspaper in the right way, it might come apart (some pages will come misaligned, etc.). The newspaper reader’s technique involves (a) holding it in the right way (b), taking out the small “packages” of information contained within the paper (that is, taking out the “arts” or “business week,” mini-magazines in themselves, from the body of the newspaper) and (b) being okay with the fact that an article will be scattered all over the newspaper (the one that starts on A2 continues on A18, and so forth). Furthermore, there are also proper ways of putting the newspaper in your bag so that it doesn’t dismember itself.
While this may be common knowledge to the average newspaper reader, it is something that I have had to get used to. Back where I live, in Puerto Rico, most newspapers have more of a “book” or “magazine” format, where you just… well, turn the pages. In the NYT, if you want to read the Arts section, you have to literally separate that segment. Indeed, in some way, you ‘dismantle’ a part of the paper. The NYT consists of a pool of little “packages” of information which the reader selects, as if selecting a particular pencil from a drawer. This feeling of “taking out a package” from a “drawer” is made all the more manifest by the physical format of the NYT.
(As far as reading newspapers goes, I am still very much a padawan. Much like Luke Skywalker at the beginning of “A New Hope,” if I were to be given a NYT while blindfolded, in fifteen minutes there would be a mess of papers all around the room. But I love to read it, and I love to feel it: the texture of the paper, the typeface, and the small columns of clustered letters, the accidental ink blots on the corner of the page—you name it. Moreover, I love knowing that as I walk down the halls of Loyola, the newspaper lies neatly folded among my books in my backpack, waiting to be read before it is thrown to the trash—or recycle bin.)
Enter: digital media in its various forms. That is, the internet, the iPhone, the e-reader, and so forth. All of these have been seen as threats to the old, clunky but lovable newspaper in print.

So now I have an iPhone; and in my iPhone, I’ve got a Twitter app. I follow the BBC, the NYT, CNN, Barack Obama, and The Onion, among others. I can see their headlines on my screen and click on those which interest me the most. Much like the different physical packages of information that I select from the newspaper, here I select digital packages and read those which I prefer. Because it really must come down to that—I can’t read all the overwhelming information from all the news sources.

Which leads me to what Barry Schwartz called the paradox of choice. I will not repeat his lecture here (though I have provided a link to a video in which he explains it). But it all boils down to this: in our society, we have been taught that we have the “choice” to do whatever we want. We choose our food, our pants, our lovers, our religion. And that’s great. But what happens when you go to a supermarket and you see that there are over 50 breakfast cereals you can choose? Or that once you choose to be a Christian, you have to choose what kind of Christian you want to be (do you want to be an Evangelical, a Catholic, or one of the Jesus Camp kids?).
I remember going to The Strand bookstore (’18 Miles of Books!’) in New York this past Spring Break. Three floors. Stacks, stacks, and more stacks. The advertisement does not lie: there are eighteen miles of books in this store. I was overwhelmed. Why? Because I didn’t know what choice to make, amidst this mist of choices. Thus, the paradox of choice.
Wouldn’t we be facing the same dilemma with digital media? With digital media, there is no limit to the amount of books we can have in a store—we can have 18, 18,000, or 18,000,000 miles of virtual books, for all we care.
Since the state does not (and cannot) control the flow of information (otherwise this would be a totalitarian state, which the twentieth century taught us was a big no-no), then it must let the information run free. But if information runs free with such great numbers, whose brain would be big enough to take it in?
The physical newspaper, even if it is clunky, limits this wide panorama, and allows me to focus on this or that article—on this or that “package of information.” The newspaper is a drawer; but the virtual world is an endless archive.

Is this necessary?

My one big problem with the Ipad and other e-readers is that I really do not understand the necessity of it. For one thing, what's so hard about getting a book or heading to a library to check out one? Can we buy any book from an e-reader, like a kindle or an Ipad? I'm not sure the answer to that but I'm sure you guys could help me out, cause that seems like the best reason to having one of these. The biggest perk to having one of these would be the availability of multiple texts at once to download at leisure.

On the other hand though I do understand the "cool" factor of all the new technology. I've even bought into the wide spread advances in technology over they years but I keep reverting back. Two years ago I upgraded to a phone with internet on it. I realized what is the necessity of this when I can just get on the internet at home? I know there is a convenience factor but we can live without. All the ads looking to sell these products to us make it seem so necessary, but we just need to think back three or four years and we were all getting along just fine without internet on our phones, if not better.

Just last year I bought an Ipod touch for the cool touch screen and the games and applications that made the idea of an ipod with music on it just a second hand feature. I bought the touch for the unnecessary perks and not for the music capabilities and memory. Now, I'm trying to sell my touch so I can actually fit all my music onto my ipod.

With that said, I do get why people want these new products. They are amazing in terms of technology, but in terms of necessity? We don't need them. Not now. Who knows how far they will come along in a few years, but for now I still think we can live without, I know I can. I actually prefer it. I know these first versions of e-readers are great starter products, but they are unnecessary. I'm not sure what types of perks will come out in a few years with the ipad and kindle to make it necessary for my life, but until them I'm not extremely interested in them other than I'd like to be involved in the new revolution of technology. This "digital" human era that is arising is crazy and we are lucky to be a part of it. Stuff we do not even need is ready to become household necessities. 2nd graders and 3rd graders with cell phones, why does that even seem ok?

This stuff is cool, and the assimilation of them into our society is inevitable, but do we need them? Definitely not.

Digital Fish Extended

So, in order to go sleep in hammocks and wash my hair in the river, I conducted a research project on reef fish of Belize. In order to do this, I read case studies of what species of fish are prominent in specific regions of the country, read through various databases like the encyclopedia of life and the florida museum of natural sciences, and googled latin names of fish for pictures that seemed to show both the fish and any color phases, curious behavior or relative size. Thus, unforeseeable hours were spent reading digital information about fish I will be encountering in real life come mid May when I travel to Belize with my Tropical Ecology class.

A lot of the fascination I have with the ocean is from physically being submerged in the ocean, out of my natural habitat and being lost amid the coral. Having to avoid swimming into fish, trying to maintain buoyancy and remembering to breath continuously are some of the distractions that come while scuba diving. Yet, being in the water with while a reef shark swims above you, being peaceful and graceful unlike our cultural understanding of a shark; being caught inside a school of blue runners; watching a yellow head jawfish burrow into the sand and argue with those fish who dare enter his territory or witnessing a sergeant major defend his eggs--all these experiences are not achieved in this way while studying the fish on a computer back in New Orleans where the Gulf or Mississippi water are profoundly murky and devoid of substantial life.

Yet, while one is diving, they have a limited field of vision due to wearing goggles and being covered in equipment that limits mobility and turning. I came close to having a dive accident (not a fun experience) and had to sit on the boat for a while. While my guide was with the others below, I happened to see a manta ray surface near the boat. My guide has spent 10 years searching for the sight of a manta ray and obviously been on a lot of dives since his occupation requires it. On a computer, however, you can look up any species of fish and access an incredible amount of information, regardless of the chance that limits divers.

So, what is the relationship between researching fish on a computer in order to prepare myself for field research at Glover's Reef in Belize? How is writing in a blog about the relationship between reading and accessing information digitally versus physically? How is reading a book that far from an e-reader when gaining first hand experience or listening to someone talk about what it is you're reading?

A Memoir-ella: Part 2, The Follow Up

With different reading tastes in mind, here comes the e-reader. What is th

e e-reader going to contribute to my life and how will it change my ideas of literature? I'm anticipating both the best and the worst.

Already coming off the stress of what to read, now my professors are questioning HOW I read. I love the flip of the pages, the bending of the spine, and the cliché coffee stains splattered across the back cover. I even love the curling of the four paperback corners. However, I must say goodbye to that when I put on the e-reader right? Okay, fine. I'll do it. (But only cause my self-help book told me I should be "open to the new".)

With this question in the air - I relate it to another transition I just went through. This week my computer crashed and the motherboard fried. For a college student, this is a nightmare of great proportions. So, in I go to Best Buy to fix the mess. Knowing, regrettably, that

this is my second failed HP Pavilion, I tell Justin - my new Geek Squad friend - that "I will never get another HP!" He then proceeds to bring me to the PC section where, in my mind, all I see is...motherboard failure after the next.

Lit up strategically with small spotlights by the Best Buy staff, the Apple section looks like heaven. Mac Mac Mac and more Mac. All white and clean and slim. I felt like I've just seen the before and after of a Jenny Craig program. From the bulky, loud PCs to the clean, sleek Macs - I am definitely intimidated. As one who is pretty good with computers I ask all the questions from RAM to conversions to software.

I am sold. I walk out of there - my wallet crying - with my new white MacBook.

Just as I walk out I think to myself, I am one of them. I am a Mac. Damn. No longer can I be that middle class PC kid who has an overly loud fan and a slowed down motherboard only capable of running one thing at a time. I also missed my sticker collection on the back. Instead, I was now apart of this prestigious club of photo booths and iChats.

And like the books I read, I got reactions. Some good, some bad, some impressed, some disgruntled, others envious. Overall they were judgements. They were sizing me up. They were sizing my new technology up.

However, after a couple of days with my new Mac, I have to admit - its great. My "knowledgeable" reputation of a great computer geek as changed, since a Mac runs completely differently - but its everything the hot guy in the commercial promised me. It proves to be fast, easy, and very pretty. I realized like my books, a Mac is different and prone to opinions, but I'm still getting something out of it. A PC gave me incredible patience. A Mac gives me less weight in my bag.

So this conversion from PC to Mac and paperback to e-reader may not be so bad. I might miss the stickers and the coffee stains, but less weight is always nice.

A Memoir-ella: The Life and Anxiety of a Reading Reputation

As an English major, I've always had a passion to read. At first it was Margaret Brown's Goodnight Moon at the age of 5, then by 9 it went to the sophisticated Judy Blume series, and now at 20, the respectable William Gibson's Spook Country.

With all of that said, its safe to say that fiction is my reigning literary interest. However, I feel like I can safely say thats true for most people. Fictitious literature is usually what society thinks of when we use the term "reading". But why is "reading" limited to this specific type of work? Now, you may say that I'm wrong and that theres all types of reading we focus on. I challenge you.

When someone asks you, "What are you currently reading?" Don't many of us scramble through our minds...ok what am I reading?

You don't usually think of the newspaper this morning or the blog this afternoon, no. You think of the coveted NOVEL.

So...lets try again. What am I reading? What was the last thing I read?

Wasn't it...Argov's Why Men Marry Bitches in the self-help section? No. I can't say that, thats not respectable.

Shit. Okay...ummm how about - "Ohh! Well, now

that you mention it, I'm reading James Joyce's Uylsses - no big deal or anything."

Because don't we all criticize what each other is reading? Would I even really respect a sorority girl reading self-help books for the relationship impaired? Ironically, no.

I'll admit I've been in a class where I either A) didn't do the reading, B) forgot about the reading, or C) didn't understand the reading. But because of my great sorority stigma - OF COURSE I'm going to fake my way through the next hour and fifteen minutes of Dr. Adam's Contemporary Topics: Rhetoric class.

Now, mind you, I'm not saying every time I'm in a class I'm full of b***. All I am saying is that I know that people judge my reading capabilities and reading selections.

So when a senior English Literature major came up to me in the Peace-Quad today and asked, "What are you reading?" I look down at that fateful book in my Indian style lap as I sat on the grass. I flip the cover over and proudly let him see Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House - because a political biography of the 35th president of the United States can't be bad. It shows my political intellect and broad literary range of course. He reacts, "Oh. The Kennedys? Really?"

Great Cait. Great.

Obviously my attempt at expanding my horizons is not getting me far.

Instead, I started to reflect all the times that was in a class and let my "Greek" show. I remembered last year when my music journalism class associated me with Taylor Swift. I remembered my English essay when I misspelled the author of Lolita. And I remembered yesterday when (once again) I had no idea what the hell Chris Bowers was talking about in my theory class.

It was then I realized: I didn't care. I honestly don't care what people think of my music, movie, art, or book interests are. I read what I am interested in at the time and take what I can from each selection.

I now know that Robert Frost attended JFK's inauguration ceremony. I now know that "self-help" books have been in use since 2500 B.C. I also know that if you want a white bunny to walk around your bedroom at night, well thank you Brown, you can.

So suck it avant-garde, non-conformist, brooding artist types. I'm going to read I Heart Taylor Swift and Geovanni's Room at the same time, anytime.

I just hope the next time will be on a ereader.

ceci n'est pas une livre

I was sitting on the patio of a restaurant on Magazine last night and saw a very odd thing. There was a gentleman walking down the sidewalk while reading his Kindle in one hand. Reading while walking though interesting, and sort of impressive, by itself isn't what was odd about it. The odd thing was that in his non-Kindle holding hand he was carrying a Borders bag full of recently purchased books. Two bags, in fact, of real books. Yet he was reading a simulation of a book. Books are simulacra of reality and now we have a simulacrum to hold our simulacra.

I don't have a particular point in relating this story to the interwebs only that somehow what he was doing didn't seem like reading. I'm not sure how to describe it but his demeanor and physicality were not of a person reading. What it seemed like he was doing was text messaging. We all know the look that people have on their face when they are tooling with their mobile devices in class. In fact that pose has become pretty common. I know I will be walking towards someone I vaguely know. There will be maybe 20 yards between us but I never know what to do. Do I wave? Should I yell out, "Ahoy?" I'm not really prone to raising my voice. So I pull out my phone and pretend to have something incredibly engaging taking place on it. Once we come within normal conversation range perhaps I will break off and engage the person. But probably not. More likely is that I will just continue to avert my gaze and pass without speaking. This diverted attentiveness creates a sort of blindness that seems non-conducive to walking.

Also, the books this man was carrying were not small. They were the sort of hefty tome that one does not read while walking down the sidewalks of New Orleans. It made me start to wonder what he was reading on the Kindle. It could be "War and Peace" or "Atlas Shrugged" for all I knew. Which if you think about it having something as light as the Kindle would be incredible. On the other hand it could be the New York Times. In which case he was carrying a 10 ounce newspaper which is... about how much a newspaper probably weighs. But then I started thinking, "What if I could have the whole Oxford English Dictionary on my E-reader?" Wouldn't that be incredible! 135 pounds of reference in a search-able handheld device. It would easily fit I'm sure. Would it still cost almost a thousand dollars? I don't think that sounds right, but at the same time I don't think the usual 10 dollar e-book price is right. I think the equivalent-to-the-three-hundred-dollar-annual-subscription-fee-for-online-access-but-I-get-to-keep-it-forever price sounds pretty good. This is not available and I don't know that it ever will be but it raises an interesting benefit I hadn't considered before. Reading an e-reader could be easier than reading a book. I have several books that aren't exactly the type I can grab to take on the streetcar, but with an e-reader all books have the same dimensions whether it is an issue of "Spiderman" or the complete works of Shakespeare.

This post was highly digressive and to be honest completely stream of consciousness but my point (yeah I had one when I set out) is to ask how do you walk down the street in New Orleans and not pay attention to the pavement? I would be ass over tea kettle in a heartbeat.

Digital Fish

So, some of you may be aware of my obsession with fish. I often change desktops in the Writing Center to picture of pretty fish, I work at the New Orleans Aquarium, I drove to Atlanta to see the world's largest aquarium, and I don't eat fish due to my sentiment that it's like cannibalism.

Aquariums, especially home owned, lead to habitat degradation and even species extinction. The ocean is a complex ecosystem that scientists have yet to come close to understanding. However, aquariums also promote interest and appreciation for such an ecosystem.

One of the downfalls of working at the Aquarium is that the animals you work closely with have a much shorter time span than you do. We recently lost a beautiful sandtiger shark named Zeus, and I found myself more emotionally distraught over the loss of a shark than I have been about many other personal issues that have arisen in the past year.

What does this have to do with "reading w/ the digital human", might you ask?

Well look at Dr. Schwartz addition of the electronic fish. I think they are quite cute, and I enjoy feeding them. However, I wonder if we overfed them or neglected to feed them if they would die. Kathryn Bell, a celebrity sci fi nerd, tells me she raised fish on a facebook application. These fish actually died and were shown floating upside down in a virtual fish bowl. What does it mean that we're even virtualizing the death of things which were never alive in the first place? Wouldn't we want to overlook death in a virtual world and allow these stupid fish to keep swimming?

This brings me to the E-reader. It has been mentioned in a previous blog that E-readers do not have the ability to carry our coffee stains, dog-ears and the scents of our days. Is this a loss or is this overcoming something we loose in physical objects?

I'm not sure all of these add up. I just like the virtual fish.

I don't know

Less than twenty-four hours after Robert sat me down in his office and asked me why I haven’t contributed anything to this blog, I bore witness to something worth blogging about.

This morning I tutored adults at St. Charles Presbyterian Church, a few blocks away from Loyola’s campus, for about an hour, much like I always do. I have been tutoring at St. Charles for approximately a year now, and I’ve never experienced anything wildly out of the ordinary. Today, however, was different; today, one of my tutees, Jane, brought in her new e-reader.

I was checking another tutee’s answers to a few division problems on a piece of paper when Jane pulled out a black leather case from which she dislodged a brand new Amazon Kindle. Her actions, not surprisingly, elicited a reaction from the tutee whose answers I was checking: Isabel.

“What’s that?” Isabel asked, curious.

“It’s a Kindle” Jane responded in her heavy Oriental accent.

“What’s a Kindle?”

“It’s like a book. You can download books to it from the internet. Here, let me show you.”

As Jane walked to the other side of the room, I continued checking Isabel’s answers, but I still managed to observe them inconspicuously. I was curious myself, not so much about the Kindle, but about how they would respond to it. Jane proceeded to show off all the flashy features: the built-in dictionary, the note-taking system, etc. I had seen all of this stuff before; it was nothing new to me. So I continued to check the answers with my pen. Jane, not surprisingly, kept blabbering on about how great her Kindle is. She explained to Isabel that English is her third language, that she goes to St. Charles in order to get help learning the language, etc. I wasn’t really listening to her until she stated that her Kindle will help her with her English. This struck me as odd. I wasn’t sure why she said this—as far as I knew, the e-reader doesn’t offer anything educational that a book doesn’t also offer—so I queried Jane as to why her Kindle would help her learn English.

“Because it reads to you.”

“It reads to you?” I asked, astonished, disillusioned.

“Yes, it reads to you. Listen.” Jane walked next to me, pressed a button or two, and a voice issued forth from the Kindle, a voice I cannot describe with my own words. It was “cold and yet full of intimation; utterly without warmth, as if a machine had stamped it there, constructed it by pattern…It poured forth a saturated, sopping heat that made [me] sit rigid in [my] chair, unable to look away” (Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip, Chap. 15). The voice, mechanical as it was, read part of a children’s story.

It was, I confess, one of the creepiest moments I have witnessed in a long, long time, hearing that mechanical, lifeless voice. Perhaps it had an even stronger, more surreal effect on me because of all the science fiction I have read. For example, I own Isaac Asimov’s The Complete Stories: Volume One, and in one of his short stories, Asimov describes a future world in which students learn—not from people—but from machines:



Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, “Today Tommy found a real book!”

It was a very old book. Margie’s grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.

They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to—on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had hen they read it the first time.

“Gee,” said Tommy, “what a waste. When you’re through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and it’s good for plenty more. I wouldn’t throw it away.”

“Same with mine,” said Margie. She was eleven and hadn’t seen as many telebooks as Tommy had. He was thirteen. (Asimov, “The Fun They Had”)




This passage, or something like it, quickly resounded in my mind as I listened to that digital, inanimate voice. In the light of e-readers, Asimov’s stories are clearly more prescient than ever before. In “The Fun They Had,” he mentions “telebooks,” books that, according to him, one reads on a television screen. Clearly Asimov’s telebooks are not e-readers, but he certainly wasn’t far off from hitting the nail on the head in his vision. What simultaneously interests and terrifies me about this story is the value that the characters place on a “real book.” It’s in the opening sentence of the story; it’s the centerpiece of the story; in fact, one even gets the sense that it’s what prompted Asimov’s story in the first place.

Jane soon shut off the voice. She then returned to her seat to continue reading quietly, while I nervously questioned my own future. As a student of English literature, history, and philosophy, naturally I consider teaching as a potential (and likely) profession. But how will I teach if a—machine—replaces that career? Or, a better question: how will I learn if a machine replaces my current professors? Not that I think this will happen anytime soon. It’s not like e-readers are going to be in the classroom anytime soon. Wait. I can’t say that, because e-readers will be in the classroom, next semester in fact, as well as the semester after that. They’ll just add to the digital classroom takeover, just as Blogger, Twitter, and YouTube have done. But here I am sounding like a “print conservative.” Really, it’s not that I hate e-readers—I don’t. It’s something else, something I can’t describe. But I’ll stop my musing here lest I forget to mention the rest of my story.

Ms. Carol, an elder woman who serves as the administrator for the tutoring program at St. Charles Presbyterian Church, walked into the room shortly after Jane’s demonstration. Jane, sensing another opportunity to flaunt her electronic device, targeted Ms. Carol.

“Ms. Carol, look at my new Kindle.”

“What?” Ms. Carol asked, looking slightly confused.

“It’s a Kindle.”

“What is it?”

“You can read and store books on it. It stores, like, thousands of books. It’s going to help me learn English. All of the GED books are really cheap. $6.99, $7.50…what do you think, Ms. Carol? Pretty cool, huh?”

Ms. Carol, whom I was watching the entire time, didn’t offer a response for a few seconds. I could see the fear in her eyes: the fear of replacement. If the Kindle helps Jane learn English, then Jane won’t need St. Charles Presbyterian Church—she’ll leave. And if all of the other students buy e-readers, then no one will be left—she’ll be out of a job (assuming, of course, that e-readers really will help people like Jane learn proper English). Again, I thought of Asimov (disregard Asimov’s gender-specific language, please; he probably wrote this ca. 1950):



Margie was hurt. “Well, I don’t know what kind of school they had all that time ago.” She read the book over his shoulder for a while, then said, “Anyway, they had a teacher.”

“Sure they had a teacher, but it wasn’t a regular teacher. It was a man.”

“A man? How could a man be a teacher?”

“Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them homework and asked them questions.”

“A man isn’t smart enough.”

...

“[Margie] said, “I wouldn’t want a strange man in my house to teach me.”

Tommy screamed with laughter. “You don’t know much, Margie. The teachers didn’t live in the house. They had a special building and all the kids went there.” (Asimov, "The Fun They Had")



In Asimov’s story, the role of the teacher has been flipped: in education humans have become the minority, the strange, the other, whereas robots have become the majority, the norm, the “regular,” as Asimov describes them. Ms. Carol recovered herself, faked a smile and muttered something about the Kindle being “pretty neat,” and left the room.

I was, at this point, legitimately terrified, but I wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was the excitement that Jane showed talking about the reader. Perhaps it was the fear I felt, or perhaps it was the fear that Ms. Carol felt. No, I decided, it wasn’t any of these; it was the way Isabel watched—not Jane—but Jane’s Kindle with glistening, salivating eyes. As Jane demonstrated the Kindle in all its greatness, Isabel just sat there, nodding like a subservient peasant, remarking occasionally on how “cool” Jane’s Kindle was. And you can probably figure out the rest of the story from here: Isabel concluded that she was going to go buy a Kindle…today. Today. It was this urgency, this impatience, that terrified me and still terrified me as I sit here typing this ridiculously long blog, putting off my Metaphysics paper all the while.

Listen: I know that my experience this morning probably shouldn’t have frightened me; in fact, it should have brightened my day: Jane will get better at English, even if she’ll be learning from a machine whose central component is a motherboard, and really this should be the only thing that matters. At this point, I feel obligated to admit that I’m planning on buying the German software from Rosetta Stone this summer to prepare for my first German course next semester. How then, you might ask, can I simultaneously condemn what I witnessed today at St. Charles’s Presbyterian Church and not condemn myself as well? It is, as Robert and I simultaneously concluded, “A Catch-22,” an inescapable byproduct of the digital world that we live in. “Digital”: the word carries so much more today than anyone probably intended for it to carry in the first place. Like “Google,” it’s entered and taken over our language. I can “Google” someone now. Fuck, I don’t even need the quotes: I can Google someone now. In fact, probably not even the caps: I can google someone now. And I think that’s the answer, that’s what ultimately frightened me today—real change is happening here. Real, inescapable change.

Listen: I think you’re all assholes for wanting to take this class. Maybe I think this because I simultaneously think that almost all of you are in it for the e-reader. Someone placed a commodity under your nose, you ate it right up, and now you can’t wait to get your hands on it. And maybe this isn’t even a good reason—maybe I don’t even have a good reason for why I think you’re assholes. Maybe my near-2000 word blog isn’t even a good reason. But that’s okay with me; thankfully, I just don’t feel like it’s my argument to make.

Microsoft's prototype ipad competitor

Microsoft has an interesting video here on engadget showing a conceptual touchscreen device that seems geared toward productivity. It is not exactly an e-reader, or perhaps I should say not simply an e-reader, but watch the video it has some interesting features.

Also here is a good slideshow of the pros and cons of six e-readers that aren't the ipad.

The other day, I asked Professor Schaberg whether or not he knew if the e-readers that Loyola would provide to the students in this upcoming class would be uniform (for example, kindles) or a smattering of a few different types (for example, kindles, nooks, iPads, samsungs). He said they would probably all be one type, but I'm not so sure I'm as keen on that as I am on a variety of different e-readers. He said I should post about it and here we are.

Personally, I think studying more than one type of e-reader would add a really interesting component to the course; we could form ideas by the different reactions to various e-readers and their unique (or similar, or the same) properties and what does or does not work-- what is and isn't intriguing as to our responses and hypotheses about them.
Having a sampling of many different e-readers could prompt less specialized, more interactive theories about the e-reader as an idea rather than a collective class hypothesis about one specific type of e-reader and the history and company and following behind it--simply the e-reader as a thing, the specific e-reader chosen, the item unto and about itself.
Again, this is just a suggestion/personal opinion and I realize that this may be completely outside the "point" of the course and it may be too much of a stretch to try to maneuver around in a classroom. I just figured it was worth putting out there.

The New York Times - "In E-Book Era, You Can't Even Judge a Cover"

In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover

Bindu Wiles was on a Q train in Brooklyn this month when she spotted a woman reading a book whose cover had an arresting black silhouette of a girl’s head set against a bright orange background.

Ms. Wiles noticed that the woman looked about her age, 45, and was carrying a yoga mat, so she figured that they were like-minded and leaned in to catch the title: “Little Bee,” a novel by Chris Cleave. Ms. Wiles, a graduate student in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, tapped a note into her iPhone and bought the book later that week.

Such encounters are becoming increasingly difficult. With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to project your own literary tastes.

You can’t tell a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one.

“There’s something about having a beautiful book that looks intellectually weighty and yummy,” said Ms. Wiles, who recalled that when she was rereading “Anna Karenina” recently, she liked that people could see the cover on the subway. “You feel kind of proud to be reading it.” With a Kindle or Nook, she said, “people would never know.”

Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach. That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form: if you notice the jackets on the books people are reading on a plane or in the park, you might decide to check out “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or “The Help,” too.

“So often when you’re thinking of a book, you remember its cover,” said Jeffrey C. Alexander, professor of cultural sociology at Yale. “It’s a way of drawing people through the visual into reading.”

In the bookstore, where a majority of sales still take place, covers play a crucial role. “If you have already passed that hurdle of having a customer be attracted to the cover, and then they pick up the book,” said Patricia Bostelman, vice president for marketing at Barnes & Noble, “an enormous battle has been won.”

But it’s a victory that will be harder to eke out if no one can tell whether you’re reading “War and Peace” or “Diamonds and Desire.”

Perhaps no other element of the book-making process receives as much input from as many different people as the jacket. First, a creative director comes up with an idea. (How about this image of an apple?) Then the book’s editor, author and agent have a look. (Can we enlarge the font size on the author’s name? And wasn’t an apple used for that book about vampires? This book isn’t about vampires.) The publisher of the imprint gets involved. (Vampires sell. I like the apple.) The sales force makes comments. (Isn’t there an economics angle? How about an apple with an orange inside? That’s worked before.) Even booksellers have an opinion. (What I really love on a cover is a pair of high heels.)

A good jacket is unlikely to save a bad book, of course. But in a crowded market, a striking cover is one advantage all authors and publishers want. To get a sense of the odds, in a random analysis of 1,000 business books released last year, Codex Group, a publishing consultant, found that only 62 sold more than 5,000 copies.

Even in the digital era, publishers believe that books need graphic representations — if only for the online marketing campaign. Regardless of the format, “they all seem to need what we know of as a cover to identify them,” said Chip Kidd, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf. Mr. Kidd has designed more than 1,000 jackets for authors including Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy.

The music industry went through a similar transition when digital music devices arrived, but it has pushed back by finding fresh ways to display CD cover art on the Web sites where the songs are bought and theiPod screens where they are played. Publishers have already had some experience tailoring book jackets for the digital world, since so many people now buy even their print copies online.

“We often get requests to make the type bigger,” said Mario J. Pulice, creative director for the adult trade division of Little, Brown & Company. “Because when it’s on Amazon, you can’t read the author’s name.”

As publishers explore targeted advertising on Google and other search engines or social networking sites, they figure that a digital cover remains the best way to represent a book.

Some readers expect makers of electronic devices to add functions that allow users to broadcast what they’re reading. “People like to show off what they’re doing and what they like,” said Maud Newton, a popular book blogger. “So eventually there will be a way for people to do that with e-readers.”

For now, many publishers are counting on the Facebook effect. “Before, you might see three people reading ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ on the subway,” said Clare Ferraro, president of Viking and Plume, imprints of Penguin Group USA. “Now you’re going to log onto Facebook and see that three of your friends are reading ‘Eat, Pray, Love.’ ”

Even avid online networkers rely on physical book covers in the real world. Heather E. Johnson, 32, who writes reviews on her blog, “Age 30+…A Lifetime of Books,” was recently at one of her son’s hockey games in Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore, when she noticed a copy of Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” lying open on the bleachers.

When a friend returned to claim it, Ms. Johnson asked for an opinion. “She said it was fabulous,” Ms. Johnson recalled. As soon as Ms. Johnson got home, she moved the title up her “to be read” list.

“I don’t know that I would start a conversation with someone about something they were reading on an e-reader,” Ms. Johnson added. “It might not be something that they want anyone to know that they’re reading.”

Some digital publishers suspect that one of the reasons romance and erotica titles are so popular in electronic editions is because e-readers are discreet.

Book jackets, though, still matter.

Holly Schmidt, president of Ravenous Romance, an e-book publisher of romance and erotica, said that in one case the publisher was offering an anthology of stories about older women and younger men. The first version featured a digital cover image of a winsome woman. It barely sold any copies. The publisher put a new cover up online — this time showing the bare, muscular torsos of three young men — and sales took off.

The new cover “took a book that was pretty much a loser,” Ms. Schmidt said, “and made it into a pretty strong seller.”

The New York Times » Arts » Books

The Experience of Reading

As I am graduating and fleeing the country, I obviously won't be participating in this class. However, I found the content to be particularly engaging and asked Dr. Schwartz if I could join the blog.

When I first heard about e-readers, I was rather disturbed. This was an over-reaction, of course, but I'm the kind of student who can't bear reading articles off Blackboard without printing them out. When I think of reading, I think of cracking the spine and the smell of weathered pages. I think of struggling to find the right position as I'm sitting on my porch in the rain or laying out on a blanket in the park. I think of the feeling of pages on my fingers, feeling the weight of words in my hands and underlining passages that I have to put down in order to fully appreciate.

And then I heard about e-readers, where the entire experience of reading is altered and almost unrecognizable. But, then I think about how I'm currently typing into a computer at this very moment. I think about how many people actually mail hand-written letters instead of e-mails. I think about how we drive instead of walk, call on cell phones instead of land lines, buy clothes from stores instead of sew them. How much of the experience is lost in all of these actions?