The age of the book has come to an end. What appears as a sign of life and vigour is in fact the fantastical paroxysm of a condemned body aware of its own imminent demise.
Blogging will have contributed to it in its own way. Whether technology is a manifestation or the cause of the problem is a moot point. Certainly the pace of life coupled with the sheer availability of images, entertainments and information makes it less likely that it will survive- except in the rarefied circles of the useless and the futile.The classic, ...what has endured through the grime of industrialization, the bombs, the changing parade of fashion..if there is no sense of immortality or, more prosaically, of 'lastingness', if there is no north north of the future, no wholeness but only the serving up of what is palatable in suitably repackaged sizes, then what?
If books are the anchors of the world then do we lose the world?
I think there will be a sigh of relief in some places, the awful pressure of 'inwardness' and reflectiveness relieved, the move away from the infinite grave weight balanced against the world. Or, more accurately, against life. All that will come undone and the scales will wildly tip the other way before clattering to the floor. We'll feel the stars again and breathe in the open, think while walking. The cloisters of the mind, its doors flung open. The crab-like monastic mind exposed to bright sunlight as life reclaims us. It will rain inside...
For some time now it seems as if we've attempting to grow in lightness, to cast off inherited metaphysical longings, the burden of "meaning", the drive to always having to mean what we say, the finding of our place in the order of things. Speed and lightness, away from the pull of the earth and its rhythms, its seasons, its inertia and its slow and patient establishment of equilibrium.
MOOCS.
The way of the future, or so we're told. A colleague is teaching a whole course without any texts. They will, however, have to watch videos at home. Am I alone in thinking this is weird, unprecedented? Or is this just the beginning and we haven't adjusted yet? My objection: the text and the university: seven hundred years. The counter-argument: technology has moved on, things have changed, the students don't want all that old, staid dry-as-dust approach. 'Liven up yourself,' Marley used to sing. Why this conservatism, why this affinity-you, of all people!-with an institution? Freedom, freedom lies in a different direction. But since when has liberty been a free-for-all? More to the point, to invoke academic freedom is bizarre because behind the changes are lurking the twins: power and money.
Behind it all is, I think, the attempt to break up any sources of resistance. And in an age of late capitalism and frictionless flows of capital, information, that means the death of slowness (Rebecca Solnit). Which is why the book must go. Because it helps us find time.
Blogging will have contributed to it in its own way. Whether technology is a manifestation or the cause of the problem is a moot point. Certainly the pace of life coupled with the sheer availability of images, entertainments and information makes it less likely that it will survive- except in the rarefied circles of the useless and the futile.The classic, ...what has endured through the grime of industrialization, the bombs, the changing parade of fashion..if there is no sense of immortality or, more prosaically, of 'lastingness', if there is no north north of the future, no wholeness but only the serving up of what is palatable in suitably repackaged sizes, then what?
If books are the anchors of the world then do we lose the world?
I think there will be a sigh of relief in some places, the awful pressure of 'inwardness' and reflectiveness relieved, the move away from the infinite grave weight balanced against the world. Or, more accurately, against life. All that will come undone and the scales will wildly tip the other way before clattering to the floor. We'll feel the stars again and breathe in the open, think while walking. The cloisters of the mind, its doors flung open. The crab-like monastic mind exposed to bright sunlight as life reclaims us. It will rain inside...
For some time now it seems as if we've attempting to grow in lightness, to cast off inherited metaphysical longings, the burden of "meaning", the drive to always having to mean what we say, the finding of our place in the order of things. Speed and lightness, away from the pull of the earth and its rhythms, its seasons, its inertia and its slow and patient establishment of equilibrium.
MOOCS.
The way of the future, or so we're told. A colleague is teaching a whole course without any texts. They will, however, have to watch videos at home. Am I alone in thinking this is weird, unprecedented? Or is this just the beginning and we haven't adjusted yet? My objection: the text and the university: seven hundred years. The counter-argument: technology has moved on, things have changed, the students don't want all that old, staid dry-as-dust approach. 'Liven up yourself,' Marley used to sing. Why this conservatism, why this affinity-you, of all people!-with an institution? Freedom, freedom lies in a different direction. But since when has liberty been a free-for-all? More to the point, to invoke academic freedom is bizarre because behind the changes are lurking the twins: power and money.
Behind it all is, I think, the attempt to break up any sources of resistance. And in an age of late capitalism and frictionless flows of capital, information, that means the death of slowness (Rebecca Solnit). Which is why the book must go. Because it helps us find time.
1 comment:
these are not uplifting thoughts ...
but indeed,i fear too 'that the age of the book has come to an end'.
"..if there is no sense of immortality or, more prosaically, of 'lastingness'", then what?
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