Pencils, Pixels, and Panic Attacks | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 09/24/2009

For the past couple of weeks I've been dipping into Dennis Baron's A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, a history of writing technologies and a meditation on their implications.

Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that writing technologies are, as Elizabeth Eisenstein famously said of the printing press, agents of change and, as such, every technological development is met with a cacophonous chorus of delight and dismay. The brave new world introduced by the Internet is either the end of civilization as we know it or the beginning of a new and more democratic era. Baron says this polarity of responses is nothing new; every writing technology has been met with a mix of fear and optimism.

Interviews with the author have appeared this week in both Inside Higher Ed and Salon. The Salon article raises the alarm in its title—"Is the Internet Melting Our Brains?"—and then issues a "never mind" with its subtitle: "No! The author of 'A Better Pencil' explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself."

The dangerous book
Apart from being an interesting and erudite ramble through history, Baron has some things to say about reading, writing, technology, and liberty that seem particularly worth mentioning this week.

In a chapter on "TechnoFear" he discusses the original and latter day Luddites, including Ted Kaczynski, whose violent campaign against technology included killing and maiming academics and airline officials with letter bombs. Though in his anti-technology manifesto Kaczynski exempted "professors who study archaeology, history, literature, or harmless stuff like that," Baron points out that books actually are dangerous, and have been treated as such for centuries.

Humanists have dangerous minds, and they are also as heavily involved in technology as scientists and engineers and even mathematicians like the Unabomber himself. That's because writing is technology. . . .

The printing press offered writers a chance to reach a larger public at the same time that it provided governments with a means to control public access to information and to limit the spread of dangerous ideas. But controlling the printed word is always difficult. It doesn't take long for unlicensed books to evade the censor and get published, and fatwas against authors invariably backfire by increasing readership. As a result, authorities bent on controlling access to ideas may go beyond banning books and seek to punish the readers who read them. This is not a phenomenon restricted to autocratic regimes in the developing world. So prevalent are calls for removing books from libraries and classrooms in the United States that every year since 1982 the American Library Association, together with other library, journalism, and publishing groups, has cosponsored "Banned Books Week" during the last week in September—a chilling reminder that even in a democracy, the right to write and read requires constant vigilance.

Baron also has some thought-provoking comments on our dependence on for-profit corporations for the "free" information we access through the Internet. The U.S. Constitution inhibits government data-gathering and mining that are the backbone of Internet commerce. He finds it ironic that in an era when librarians are willing to risk prison sentences rather than reveal what patrons are reading, online booksellers use readers’ habits as critical market data. The value of information about our use of information is fraught with paradoxes.

Server farms, our new information storehouses, resemble top-secret military complexes more than they do libraries: they are outfitted with bullet-proof glass, security cameras, walls lined with Kevlar, earthquake resistant floors, and state-of-the-art access codes. Google and friends may be in the business of publishing information for all to read, but it takes more than a library card to get access to their information storehouses. . . . what's different about digital technologies is that information is not just one commodity to buy and sell, it's become the commodity, and anyone who tweaks the technology to bring information to users a nanosecond faster stands to gain a lot of market share.

So in yet another irony of the technologically motivated inversion of public and private, the business of making information public, of publishing it to our computers, involves ever-greater degrees of secrecy. That in turn brings with it the prospect that the all-digital library of the future could be the most open storehouse of words ever, but also the most inaccessible.

Spreading the word
Hysteria or hype—those seem to be the two options available when talking about the reading and writing technologies that populate our libraries. Though Baron raises significant concerns about the price of free information in a world where privacy is traded for access, he generally takes a middle ground, in which our hopes and fears are put in a historical context that demonstrates "the digital revolution is playing out as all communication revolutions do. Computers don't live up to the grandiose promises of their biggest fans. Nor do they sabotage our words, as critics loudly warn that they will. Instead, as we learned to do with our earlier writing technologies, once we adopt the computer, we adapt it to our needs, and along the way we find new and unexpected ways of changing what we do with words, and how we do it."

All the same, he seems grateful that libraries persist in protecting the freedom to read. As he says in the Inside Higher Ed interview, libraries are not like Google and Amazon, driven ultimately by a profit motive. They are public institutions that operate transparently, with a simple but important goal: "to spread the word, not control it."

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

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