Dire Prognostications?

(Taken Loosely from Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 1993)

What oral poetry was for the Greeks, printed books in general are for us.  But our

historical moment, what we might call “proto-electronic,” will not require a

transition period of two centuries.  The very essence of electronic transmissions is

to surmount impedances and to hasten transitions.  Fifty years, I’m sure, will

suffice.

                                                                                                --Sven Birkerts

The Age of Print is rapidly drawing to a close.  We have already entered into a new age of electronic communication and cyber space that will revolutionize the ways we live our lives, particularly in the ways we interact and communicate.

Being wired is already becoming more important than being literate.

The body of literate (or literary) readers is rapidly shrinking.  Readings books, as we understand the process, will become an outdated—if not obsolete—skill.

Most students today are considerable less comfortable reading than students a generation ago.  They read less, and they understand less of what they read. 

These same students are much more comfortable with computer screens than with books.  They are much more comfortable interpreting visual images and icons than textual descriptions.  They have been trained to think in images rather than in deep contemplation.

These students are going to take over the world.

The concept of reading is undergoing a drastic transformation.  In the near future nearly all reading will take place on computer screens.  What will constitute reading will take place in shorter and shorter durations, and in shorter and shorter forms.  Readers will scan for highlighted bits, bytes, and bullets of information.

The concept of literacy is undergoing a drastic transformation.  If there is a new Dark Ages, the dividing line between the ignorant masses and the enlightened few will be technological knowledge, not humanistic knowledge.

The means through which we receive information wholly affects the way we process that information.

We are losing our capacity to use language in skillful and subtle ways.

Eventually, English Departments will be merged into History Departments.  Libraries will become centers for student academic services.  

Whether all of this sounds dire or merely "different" will depend upon the reader's own values and priorities. I find these portents of change depressing, but also exhilarating at least to speculate about. On the one hand, I have a great feeling of loss and a fear about what habitations will exist for self and soul in the future. But there is also a quickening, a sense that important things are on the line. As Heraclitus once observed, "The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates." Well, the mixture is being shaken, no doubt about it. And here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch for as our "proto-electronic" era yields to an all-electronic future:

1. Language erosion. There is no question but that the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language on every societal level. The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of "plainspeak." Syntactic masonry is already a dying art. Neil Postman and others have already suggested what losses have been incurred by the advent of telegraphy and television how the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple "vision thing" and myriad other "things." Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse.

Language will grow increasingly impoverished through a series of vicious cycles. For, of course, the usages of literature and scholarship are connected in fundamental ways to the general speech of the tribe. We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

2. Flattening of historical perspectives. As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present our perception of history will inevitably alter. Changes in information storage and access are bound to impinge on our historical memory. The depth of field that is our sense of the past is not only a linguistic construct, but is in some essential way represented by the book and the physical accumulation of books in library spaces. In the contemplation of the single volume, or mass of volumes, we form a picture of time past as a growing deposit of sediment; we capture a sense of its depth and dimensionality. Moreover, we meet the past as much in the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible.

If we take the etymological tack, history (cognate with "story") is affiliated in complex ways with its texts. Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. At the same time it will become a body of disjunct data available for retrieval and, in the hands of our canny dream merchants, a mythology. The more we grow rooted in the consciousness of the now, the more it will seem utterly extraordinary that things were ever any different. The idea of a farmer plowing a field an historical constant for millennia will be something for a theme park. For, naturally, the entertainment industry, which reads the collective unconscious unerringly, will seize the advantage. The past that has slipped away will be rendered ever more glorious, ever more a fantasy play with heroes, villains, and quaint settings and props. Small-town American life returns as "Andy of Mayberry" at first enjoyed with recognition, later accepted as a faithful portrait of how things used to be.

3. The waning of the private self. We may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. For some decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise. Our technologies are not bound by season or light it's always the same time in the circuit. And so long as time is money and money matters, those circuits will keep humming. The doors and walls of our habitations matter less and less the world sweeps through the wires as it needs to, or as we need it to. The monitor light is always blinking; we are always potentially on-line.

I am not suggesting that we are all about to become mindless, soulless robots, or that personality will disappear altogether into an oceanic homogeneity. But certainly the idea of what it means to be a person living a life will be much changed. The figure-ground model, which has always featured a solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves, is romantic in the extreme. It is ever less tenable in the world as it is becoming. There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, and, outside of cinema, no more emblems of the exalted individual.

Engl 30813, The Business of Books

Williams, Spring 2013

                       

The Business of Books:

The Past, Present, and Future of Print Production and Consumption

            A room without books is like a body without a soul.  --Cicero

    The medium is the message.  –Marshall McLuhan

This course will examine the history of reading, writing, and books from the perspectives of both producers and consumers.  Beginning with discussions of orality and writing’s origins, the course will offer a historical survey of print culture since Gutenberg, examining the social and cultural significance of print as a mass media capable of shaping human attitudes.  With the development of moveable type and the printing press in the fifteenth century, human culture experienced profound shifts in every facet of experience.  With advances in technology and the explosive growth of literacy and literary marketplaces during the nineteenth century, human culture was again profoundly changed.  Today with the advent of a new digital media, human culture is experiencing an equally profound shift.  As readers move from the printed page to the computer screen, all areas of traditional print culture are changing as well, including even the most basic concepts of what it means to be a writer, reader, and publisher.  As traditional book production transitions into radical new concepts and forms, this course will conclude with discussions of future literacies.

This particular section will make use of TCU Press and its unique resources as a learning laboratory, providing an inside view of the publishing business as it moves from a traditional business model (based on retail bookstore sales) into an entirely new digital model (based on social media and online sales).  Also, as an academic class intended to enhance critical skills, the course will require students to keep journals, write brief descriptions of their observations and perceptions, participate in online class discussions, and take mid-term and final exams.

This course is offered as part of the Coleman Fellows Program and the James A. Ryffel Center for Entrepreneurial Studies Program in the Neeley School of Business.

T, 1/15

Introduction

Th, 1/17

The Past and Future of Reading?

T, 1/22

Reader Interviews

Th, 1/24

Reader Interviews

T, 1/29

The Book, Chapter 2, 27-54

Th, 1/31

The Book, Chapter 3, 54-86

T, 2/5

The Book, Chapter 4, 87-112

Th, 2/7

The Book, Chapter 5, 113-138

T, 2/12

The Book, Chapter 6, 139-158

Th, 2/14

The Concept of the Author

T, 2/19

Author Interviews

Th, 2/21

Author Interviews

T, 2/26

Introduction to Book History, Chapter 2, 28-43

Th, 2/28

Introduction to Book History, Chapter 3, 44-65

T, 3/05

Introduction to Book History, Chapter 4, 66-84

Th, 3/07

in-class mid-term

T, 3/12

Spring Break

Th, 3/14

Spring Break

T, 3/19

Publisher Interviews

Th, 3/21

Publisher Interviews

T, 3/26

Introduction to Book History, Chapter 6, 100-117

Th, 3/28

Print Is Dead, “Stop the Presses,” 1-66

T, 4/02

Print Is Dead, “Totally Wired,” 67-134

Th, 4/04

Print Is Dead, “Saying Goodbye to the Book,” 134-193

T, 4/09

Bookstore Employee Interviews

Th, 4/11

Bookstore Employee Interviews

T, 4/16

Introduction to Book History, Chapter 7, 118-132

Th, 4/18

“The Digital Revolution,” from John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture

T, 4/23

Final Presentations

Th, 4/25

Final Presentations

T, 4/30

Final Presentations

Course Requirements:

1)    Blogging: To document your reading and research experiences, and as well to comment overall on your work in this course, you are required to keep an online journal or weblog.  With the help of technology at Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), you will build your own web log, or “blog,” and keep an electronic journal of your experiences as a reader and more generally as an individual reflecting on the literacy revolutions.  You will be expected to write a minimum of 8 brief (1- to 2-page) responses. What you write is up to you.  You do not have to attempt a critical analysis of the assigned texts, but I encourage you to reflect on your experiences as a reader reading about textual production and reading. I would like you to comment on what your reading experiences were like.  What happened when you sat down and opened up a book or text?  How—and why--did you respond to what you read?  In addition to reflecting on your experiences as a reader, I would also like to reflect on what you are learning, both in our class and your other classes.  I would like you to keep a record of what was valuable, and what was less valuable.   Finally, and much more generally, you are encouraged to write about whatever moves you to write.  But please remember that a blog is not a personal—and private—diary.  You must post 4 blog entries before midterm, and 4 after midterm.

Blogging is a less formal form of writing than an essay, and thus blogs are a good

forum to reflect, analyze, vent, explore, and consider.  But blogs are also a more

public form of writing and, because of the technology, an excellent way of sharing,

collaborating, and responding.  In addition to posting your own blog entries, you will

also be required to post 8 brief responses of around a paragraph to half page to

other course blogs throughout the semester.  You are welcome to comment on any

of the other course blogs, but please vary the blogs you respond to.  Please do not

respond to the same blog (and person).

Please keep in mind that blogs are a public forum, accessible to anyone who has

internet access, so please do not post anything that you would not share with the

classroom and internet communities.

Since this is a new course, we will use our course blogs as an open dialogue to reflect

on our experiences in this course.

The minimum requirement? 8 blog entries (1 to 2 page journals) and 8

(paragraph to a page) responses to other course blogs.  You may write more, but

this is the minimum.

I will not respond to every blog, but I will read all entries and respond every so often.

2)    Lead Respondent Assignment: Throughout the semester students will be asked to help lead our discussions, and these discussion-leader assignments may be undertaken individually or in small groups (maximum of 3).  Each individual or group will choose a day and will be expected to make a presentation to the class on that day’s assigned reading[s].  These presentations may include summaries of the primary themes and issues.  Individuals and teams are also encouraged to offer their opinions on the opinions, perceptions, and conjectures of the various authors.  Equally importantly, these presentations should also include a brief discussion of what the individual (or group) thinks is significant and/or relevant in the text[s] and a list of questions for discussion.  Responders will be expected to help lead the class discussions.  These presentations should be informative and provocative.  Yet at the same time they should also be interesting!  I encourage you to consider creative suggestions for stimulating interest and arousing attention.  Multimedia presentations are always welcome.  You should think about how you can make these presentations engaging.

A brief handout summarizing key points, pertinent information, and listing the questions for discussion is required.

3)    Four Interviews:  At four different times during the semester you will be asked to conduct interviews and then come back to class to present what you have learned from your interviews.  These interviews may be undertaken individually or in a small group.  Early in the semester you will be asked to interview 4 readers (These I perceive as more surveys than interviews).  As we proceed in the semester, you will then be asked to interview an author, a publisher, editor, or book designer, and finally a bookseller or bookstore employee.  For the reader surveys, I would like a 1 to 2-page synopsis of your findings.  The final three interviews (author, publisher, and bookseller) must either be videotaped or sound recorded, and by the last day of class—at the latest!—you must turn in a transcription of your interviews.  The last class is the last possible day I will accept your transcriptions, but I strongly encourage you to submit them earlier!  Please do not wait until the final two weeks to transcribe three interviews! 

4)    Exams:  There will be midterm and final exams.  Each exam will consist of two parts, a take-home essay section and an in-class brief description section. 

5)    Final Presentations:  For your final assignment, I would like you to put together a multimodal project that presents a reflection of your semester’s research and learning—your final thoughts, observations, and ponderings of your experiences as a student of book culture throughout the semester. Consider what you have learned that was interesting, striking, or memorable.  These projects may include photographs, videos, sketches, recordings, music, prose, and poetry. You may use Power Point or present a video, or use other forms of multimodal presentation.  Please be as creative as you like.  As with the lead respondent assignments, please consider how to engage your audience’s attention.  Along with your presentation, you must submit a 1- to 2-page explanation and justification of your presentation.  These projects may be done individually or in small groups (maximum of 3).  If done as a group project, each person's individual contributions must be apparent.

6)    Short Writing Assignments:  Students will often be asked to write a brief response in class to a specific question or quotation.  These responses will be used to stimulate discussions and, while they will not be formally graded, they will be collected and receive some credit (a √, a √+, a √-, or 0 credit).

.

7)    Class Attendance and Participation:  For my own records I will take attendance, but I am not formally setting an attendance policy.  You are responsible for your own attendance.  I caution you, however, to keep in mind that in-class writing assignments and in-class activities cannot be made up or turned in late.  Also, I caution you to keep in mind that you are required to participate in class discussions and to contribute to the class’s success.  Your participation and contributions will make a difference in deciding borderline grades.

8)    Familiarity with the Texts:  This is the most important requirement.  A reading knowledge of the assigned texts is expected and essential.  Failure to demonstrate a familiarity with the assigned texts (whether in discussion or in writing) will result in low grades.  Please read the assigned texts.

9)    A Sense of Humor and an Appreciation of Irony:  I also ask for your patience, understanding, and good humor.  I sincerely wish that all of us enjoy our work together, and I ask for your help in making this course a success.  The more we enjoy what we are doing, the more we will get out of the course.

Finally, I take pride in working closely with students.  I will make myself available whenever necessary.  If you have questions or problems with this course or your general

studies, please let me know,

Grading Scale:

            Blogs                                                               20%

            Lead Discussions                                            10%

            Interviews                                                        20% (5% each)

            Midterm exam                                                 10%

            Final exam                                                       10%

            In-class Writing/Activites                                10%

            Final Presentations                                          20%

           

Dan Williams

Reed 414D, TCU Press

#6250 (Reed), #5907 (TCU Press)

d.e.williams@tcu.edu

Office hours: Fridays, 10 AM to Noon, and by appointment.  Please verify where I am holding office hours before trying to locate me.  I am most often found at TCU Press, located at 3000 Sandage on the far eastern edge of campus.

Required Texts:

1. Introduction to Book History, Finkelstein and McCleery

2. The Book: Life Story of A Technology, Nicole Howard

3. Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, Jeff Gomez

Academic Conduct:

An academic community requires the highest standards of honor and integrity in all of its participants if it is to fulfill its missions. In such a community faculty, students, and staff are expected to maintain high standards of academic conduct. The purpose of this policy is to make all aware of these expectations. Additionally, the policy outlines some, but not all, of the situations which can arise that violate these standards. Further, the policy sets forth a set of procedures, characterized by a "sense of fair play," which will be used when these standards are violated. In this spirit, definitions of academic misconduct are listed below. These are not meant to be exhaustive.

I. ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT

Any act that violates the spirit of the academic conduct policy is considered academic misconduct. Specific examples include, but are not limited to:

A. Cheating. Includes, but is not limited to:

1. Copying from another student's test paper, laboratory report, other report, or computer files and listings.

2. Using in any academic exercise or academic setting, material and/or devices not authorized by the person in charge of the test.

3. Collaborating with or seeking aid from another student during an academic exercise without the permission of the person in charge of the exercise.

4. Knowingly using, buying, selling, stealing, transporting, or soliciting in its entirety or in part, the contents of a test or other assignment unauthorized for release.

5. Substituting for another student, or permitting another student to substitute for oneself, in a manner that leads to misrepresentation of either or both students work.

B. Plagiarism. The appropriation, theft, purchase, or obtaining by any means another's work, and the unacknowledged submission or incorporation of that work as one's own offered for credit. Appropriation includes the quoting or paraphrasing of another's work without giving credit therefore.

C. Collusion. The unauthorized collaboration with another in preparing work offered for credit.

D. Abuse of resource materials. Mutilating, destroying, concealing, or stealing such materials.

E. Computer misuse. Unauthorized or illegal use of computer software or hardware through the TCU Computer Center or through any programs, terminals, or freestanding computers owned, leased, or operated by TCU or any of its academic units for the purpose of affecting the academic standing of a student.

F. Fabrication and falsification. Unauthorized alteration or invention of any information or citation in an academic exercise. Falsification involves altering information for use in any academic exercise. Fabrication involves inventing or counterfeiting information for use in any academic exercise.

G. Multiple submission. The submission by the same individual of substantial portions of the same academic work (including oral reports) for credit more than once in the same or another class without authorization.

H. Complicity in academic misconduct. Helping another to commit an act of academic misconduct.

I. Bearing false witness. Knowingly and falsely accusing another student of academic misconduct.

Disabilities Statement:

Texas Christian University complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 regarding students with disabilities.  Eligible students seeking accommodations should contact the Coordinator of Services for Students with Disabilities in the Center for Academic Services located in Sadler Hall, 11.  Accommodations are not retroactive, therefore, students should contact the Coordinator as soon as possible in the term for which they are seeking accommodations. Further information can be obtained from the Center for Academic Services, TCU Box 297710, Fort Worth, TX 76129, or at (817) 257-7486.

Adequate time must be allowed to arrange accommodations and accommodations are not retroactive; therefore, students should contact the Coordinator as soon as possible in the academic term for which they are seeking accommodations.  Each eligible student is responsible for presenting relevant, verifiable, professional documentation and/or assessment reports to the Coordinator.  Guidelines for documentation may be found at http://www.acs.tcu.edu/DISABILITY.HTM.

Students with emergency medical information or needing special arrangements in case a building must be evacuated should discuss this information with their instructor/professor as soon as possible.