Book Review: The Future of the Page edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor - Page 2

Or it may simply be the case that 500 years of entrenched reading habits have not yet met the right catalyst to undo our literary inertia. The generation which has driven a revolution in the delivery and enjoyment of audio and video is not yet mature enough to have an impact upon the publishing industry. We have yet to witness amongst publishers the same sort of uproar that gripped the RIAA as teenagers around the world began to share audio files through Napster. But the publishing industry's day may yet arrive. Shortly after this book's release, Google announced a partnership with several major libraries to scan their collections as fully searchable text. As the use and architecture of the world wide web is increasingly determined by those (younger) people who have been weaned of or have never really felt attached to print media, the publishing industry will have no choice but to adapt. And it will have to begin by reconceptualizing the page. It is in this task that The Future of the Page may prove most valuable.

The essays which are most forward–looking are those considering work which, while still operating within the printed page, pushes the page to its limits. For example, Jerome McGann considers the very problem which Google would present after he had written his essay, by considering whether it even makes sense to produce digital archives of poetry. Because of the way poetry signifies its meaning, much of what counts in poetry appears merely as 'noise' in a marked up text of searchable information. What he claims for poetry also applies to most literary fiction. The reason, as he puts it, is that poeisis "tends to involve more broadly 'semiotic' rather than narrowly 'linguistic' materials." Or, to be more practical about it, Google may be engaged in a monumental waste of time and money if it isn't prepared to do a little theoretical thinking before it starts mobilizing its scanners.

Perhaps the most effective essay isn't an essay at all, but more a visual presentation titled "Our Bodies Are Not Final" by Edison del Canto. It plays upon the ancient metaphor that relates the presumed fixity of the text to the solidity of our bodies while drawing a parallel relationship between meaning and soul. The problem with digital media is that it eliminates the solid sense of text and leaves us in doubt of our own embodiment. Ironically, this piece includes the following passage set amongst red and black squares:

Academic expert culture is a culture of command. It secures authority. It achieves command and authority by subjecting you to institutionally legitimated intellectual and sociological power structures. You achieve command by being yourself commanded, and you secure authority by subjecting yourself to institutional authority.

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

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