The consolations of reading, the consolations of friendship (draft) (26 Nov 2010)

I imagine a book would not be blurbed this way anymore. This is on the front cover of the Bantam Windstone edition of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which I found in a cardboard box out in front of thrift store in Astoria: "I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly -- this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." I found that idea appealing in a contrarian way: Here's the anti-page turner, a book that will stop my attention-deficit-driven cultural consumption in its tracks, tame it, discipline it while honing my ability to focus, to luxuriate in well-turned prose, in lapidary lines lazing their way toward nowhere in particular. And the novel hasn't disappointed in that regard; I'm halfway through it and I still don't know or even care what it is about. I just have come to trust that it is shot through with these precise observations of how a peculiar mind might register things -- a mind that, it turns out, is not so unlike my own since I recognize these observations as apt, as true. It gives me an earned but fleeting sense of empathy, and possibly with a character who is supposed to be crazy.

But I can't ignore my eagerness to be done with Housekeeping and be on to the next thing. I fidget with the book, idly riffle the pages, anxiously look ahead for the end of the chapters, try to cram extra pages into smaller spaces of free time, on the commute or during lunch breaks, when most of my fiction reading gets done. Sometimes I even get annoyed with the more eloquent passages: "Fine, I'll read that again; I know I should read that again because I barely gleaned half of it."

Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experience, but I tend to associate my personal impatience in situations like these with a more general, cultural one. I suspect the existence of a free-floating ideological imperative (consume more! consume more!) that manifests in these moments of annoyance at information that comes to me not predigested. Don't they know how much I feel I must keep up with, how much information I "have to" process? Aren't they aware, as I am, acutely, of how much is out there? I sense the book dragging me away from the data stream, and I find myself resisting and resenting it, as if it were taking me away from life and from the world.

Digitization has of course made access to consumable culture a lot easier, and the internet and social media have made us aware of a lot more stuff that would feasibly interest or enrich us. On the surface, this is enormously beneficial. But this makes me aware of the shortness of my time; it works as a perpetual, low-level intimation of mortality, the opposite of Wordsworth's Ode. ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?")

In that poem -- very Thanksgiving appropriate, by the way -- Wordsworth rhapsodizes about "that immortal sea" of eternal truth (or something) that for him is available through contemplative reflection. He claims that "the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It seems to me that instead of being transported to that sea, contemplation of the sort prompted by Robinson's book or that poem itself makes me feel cut off, as if I am dropping down a shaft. I find I don't want to go down into the well of deep aesthetic appreciation like I used to. It's lonely down there. Social-mediatized books (via) may help, but will likely make reading the sort of books that can take you to such a contemplative, slow place beside the point. Why read difficult books when you can read Facebook updates and chat, if what you are looking for is a sense of communion, of what Facebook calls sharing? Who needs the consolations of reading anymore?

This essay by Amanda Smith Regier touches on a related problem, the feeling of isolation that now seems inescapable if one removes oneself from Facebook. After quitting Facebook for a while, she basically concedes defeat in the face of Facebook's having made conducting social life easier -- as if the point of friendship were convenience.

While deleting myself from Facebook sounded like a liberating “eff you” to technology and the constraints of modern social expectations, in fact, it just made it harder to enhance that “real social life” I had idealized.

I don't know. I dutifully try to keep up. I try to "enhance" my social life with Twitter and Facebook, which has turned that social life into another stream of information, data crammed into spare moments rather than moments lost from time, glimpses of disconnected eternity. I'm afraid that Facebook has basically made friendship less like Housekeeping and more like housekeeping. It's obligatory but largely mechanized and demands less of our active attention, though the more we do, the more there seems to be that needs to get done. But we don't expect friendship to disconnect us from the stress and pressures of everyday life. The consolations of friendship suddenly seem superfluous too. We all just stay connected, for what that's worth, scanning the social media horizon for mentions of ourselves, for signs of our life.

Nothing's gonna stop the flow (27 July 2010)

Alan Jacobs, responding to Peggy Nelson's celebration of the flow, asks:

In the Flow, are “listening” and “consuming” distinguishable activities?

That's an interesting distinction: Listening, if I'm reading Jacobs right, is way of appropriating knowledge that is not simultaneously productive or at once situated in an exchange process, as the word "consuming" implies. The digitally mediated flow seeks to make any noneconomic responsiveness to art or culture or anything else in life more or less impossible -- or at least ideologically undesirable. Why just attend a lecture when you can liveblog it and "add value" with your coverage?

The implied imperative in Web 2.0 is to make all consumption productive and allows us to avoid the ignominious fate of becoming a passive consumer -- the straw-man figure of our era who represents the inauthentic conformist couch potato who has surrendered all agency. Perhaps no subject position has been more demonized than that one in late-capitalist consumerism, as various investigations of the rebel consumer illustrate.

The flow basically eliminates the lag time that listening presupposes, the space in which a more considered response can germinate (if warranted). You might call it the space that makes a deliberate aesthetic possible. (Ross Douthat suggests this space for contemplative reading is becoming a luxury, a class-based privilege contingent on being to afford a distraction-free retreat. I would add that it's also a matter of class whether one feels impelled to be relevant through accelerated productive consumption or whether one will be confident of one's relevance as a matter of habitus.) If the immediate aesthetic response is simply a coded form of obedience to existing relations of power, the social order inscribing itself on our hearts as Eagleton argues, then obviating the space of rumination reinforces the aesthetic's ideological function. We can't dispense with the aesthetic, which allows for real experiential pleasure, a pleasure that seems to resound deep within us and call forth a certain holistic sense of ourselves that is wedded to enduring ideals of the good. But when we make our aesthetic response more deliberate, there is a chance to align our pleasure with our identity with consciously affirmed social ideals.

The real-time revolution, the rise of the flow, basically requires all responses be even more spontaneous than aesthetic approval or else be forgotten and ignored as everyone moves on with the tide of events. From the perspective of real-time hegemony, listening is an arrogant effort to arrest the flow of events rather than swim with them and contribute to the flow's momentum. Trying to stand still amid the flow, to stop and listen, to focus longer than the flow's pace permits, is to ask to be drowned as the flood washes over you.

Hiding tastes (28 April 2009)

An NYT piece by Joanna Kaufman wonders whether the Kindle will rob people of the opportunity to do what I talked of yesterday, judge people based on what sort of books they own.

How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism? If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle — that’s how many it holds — does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve actually read a couple of them.)
The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.

Kaufman notes how publishers will rue the loss of passive advertising that comes from people carrying books around. And individuals will have to become more active about their self-promotion as well. What the Kindle, like other technological developments, will force us to do is find new, technologically mediated ways to project identity. So rather than passively display books on a shelf and let people's natural curiosity run its course, the Kindle, should it catch on, will force us to publish our reading lists online somewhere in a self-fashioning ploy that one can't plausibly disavow. Of course, one could do nothing and use devices like the Kindle as a way to mask one's tastes. But the Kindle itself signifies on a different identity hierarchy. It seems unlikely that the Kindle will signify that one loves books, but probably it will work like gadgets generally and convey where one is on the early adopter/late adopter continuum more than anything else.

The mediated evolution from passive to active pruning and preening of our identity has been the story of the internet's penetration into everyday life generally. Gadgets insert themselves into that process of identity projection; they offer the individual a chance to seemingly extend their personality's reach, while at the same time they give outside parties an opportunity to exploit it. So gone is the idea of seeing someone on the train reading a book that makes you curious about them; coming is the era is using Twitter to blast out to all your followers (the future version of friends) what you are reading, with an automatic link to Amazon already worked in.

The future of book manufacturing (1 April 2009)

Reihan Salam links to this post from Tim O'Reilly, in which he suggests that publishing is becoming like software development -- a process involving many authors working quickly (and perhaps patching bugs later). The fact that he is working on a Twitter book seems to underscore the point, though I can't imagine who in the world would want such a thing. (Sort of like the board-game home version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?")

This sort of thing may indeed portend "the end of authorship," as Salam titled his post. But I'm a little surprised he didn't go the Roland Barthes route and proclaim "the death of the author," and append the Foucaulidan corollary, the triumph of the "author function." They were commenting on the dubiousness of using authorial intention in assessing the actual effects achieved by a particular text. But technology has made such concerns sort of passe. Authors aren't being discarded because their works may not say what they intend; instead, relations of production in the publishing industry call for collaboratively manufactured texts to meet corporate goals. Exit authors; enter coders.

Reilly quotes Andrew Savikis:

The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.
Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

This seems like he is saying that instabooks of the future will have lots of boilerplate in them, and will be constructed along the lines of Mad Libs. Can't wait for these. Sounds like Orwell's Ministry of Culture, from 1984, where literature-makers rotated the dials of text-spinning machines to generate timely and appropriate Party-approved entertainment for the masses.

More likely, if books become a digitized commodity, the money won't be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we'll have pseudo-books instead -- a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook. You could already compile one of commentary on the financial crisis. Alongside the collaboratively compiled, rapidly published texts from the publishing industry of the future will be micropublishing, feeding those publishers, things along the lines of blogs and Facebook updates and the like. So maybe it would be more accurate to say authorship will be everywhere and nowhere.

Kindle still seems unnecessary (10 Feb 2009)

Amazon has released a new Kindle. It costs $359. I don't know why anyone would buy that piece of crippleware when you can buy a netbook for the same price or cheaper and get unlimited functionality. (I suppose if I had experienced the magic of the Kindle's no-backlight technology, I wouldn't dismiss it so glibly.) Even in his effort to champion the device, Joel Johnson reveals its inherent limitations: "While the new model now has 2 gigabytes of memory onboard, seven times as much as the old Kindle in storage terms, it no longer has the SD flash memory card slot that made it possible to keep a library of tens of thousands of books on the device at once. While my library never really grew that big (having even a few hundred books began to make getting around in the menus somewhat awkward), knowing it could went a long way towards tickling my desire for the world’s entire written history to be in my pocket at all times." The Kindle is not apparently meant to be the book that subsumes all books; it appears to become clumsier to use the more you load onto it. In practice, it seems a novelty gadget for travelers who want respite from their laptops, but are too indecisive to settle on what book to bring on the plane.

At the Guardian's blog, Bobbie Johnson makes this apt point about the Kindle's modest success (via PSFK):

Everyone's looking at the pattern they've seen in music and video - an old medium changed radically by technology - and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It's fairly straightforward.
The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn't because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn't launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.

That seems right to me. And the reason people aren't pirating books isn't because the opportunity isn't there -- you can probably find torrents for pdfs of Harry Potter and those Twilight books if you wanted them. It's that people have other more convenient ways to share books. As Johnson explains, "the average book reader isn't turning to legally dubious sources for their novels, or meeting up with book dealers on street corners to pick up copies of the latest bestseller. If they want to share files, they can get somebody to lend them a copy, or go to a place for sharing this information that's wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries)."

Basically publishers have no incentive to encourage people to read books on screens and every incentive to get them to enjoy the fetish of the object. The preference consumers have shown for digitized music and iPods doesn't seem to translate to books. The usefulness of the iPod derives from its ability to shuffle songs that many people enjoy as background, more or less passively. On the subway I hear about a dozen songs each morning, and it pleases me that they are randomly selected from a list of several thousand. But I wouldn't want my reading material served up that way. Generally I'm reading one thing at a time, and I benefit from the finality of that decision, when I leave home with one book. Books have the great built-in advantage of preventing me from surfing away elsewhere when the reading becomes arduous or requires an effort of concentration.

Starred items are forever (2 July 2008)

Since I switched to Google Reader, I've gotten into the habit, as I'm blasting through all the blogs I subscribe to via RSS, of starring items that I want to think about more later, and perhaps even write about. Of course, I almost never refer back to these starred items, because there is a nonstop flow of new items in my Reader I'm always trying to keep pace with. Instead they linger there, with my act of starring them standing in for the promised deeper thought that never occurs. Before Google Reader, I'd tag items in del.icio.us and send them to bookmark purgatory. And I'd do a lot of thinking about what I was calling the bookmark effect, which I first noticed when studying for exams. I became aware of how underlining something or scrawling a note in the margin of a book was very gratifying, and how if I wasn't doing that, I felt like I wasn't really studying or learning anything. This was true even though the underlining was replacing thought -- it was as if I were acknowledging that someone else thought something perceptive, and it was sufficient for me to let that person be a proxy for my own thinking. The underlining was an act of appropriation, a way of buying and consuming the perceptive thought without having to think through it or extend it or integrate -- that work was left for some time later. (That time has not yet come, and I still have many of the annotated tomes to prove it.) The decision to underline was akin to a purchasing decision -- did I "buy" that idea? And this process commodified my reading for me, which gave me an elusive feeling of mastery over it, even as the reading lists continued to extend themselves.

Now, as technology has advanced, bookmarking an interesting post or article (or starring it) has supplanted underlining, etc. It's still a way for me to dispatch interesting ideas without having to deal with them any more deeply -- I just add them to the collection, and take comfort that it is there, forever fresh in my starred items list. It's not all that different from buying books in lieu of reading them. The bookmarking/starring gesture allows me to consume in the present moment the thinking I pretend I'll do later, which is an extremely gratifying feeling, particularly if I wisely avoid ever consulting my bookmarks later on. If I make that mistake, though, I feel nothing but shame for my laziness, and despair when the deferred overwhelmingness of it all hits me like a furnace blast.

At some point I'll need to do a link dump of all that stuff, sort through it and see if still recognize the potential I once saw there. But still the urge to avoid is strong; the ideas seem more potent as unrealized potential. Sorting through them would be like cleaning out my closet; I'd be forced to get rid of stuff that I may never use but that still somehow comforts me to possess.

Versioning and the Kindle (11 June 2008)

You know you've been thoroughly indoctrinated into neoclassical economics when you can embrace the benefits of discriminatory pricing and see nothing unfair about different classes of people paying different prices for the same good or more nefariously, companies purposely degrading or adulterating products to sell them at different prices and break consumers into different classes. This process, known as versioning (explained in this paper by economist Hal Varian), explains why many software suites (or Windows Vista) ship standard with certain functions included in the code but disabled, forcing customers to buy the gold or platinum package to have them made operable. (Sometimes this is dubbed crippleware.) It's also why DVD players don't play discs from all regions automatically, why more and more services are being stripped from coach class, and so on. If one can see that intentional destruction as actually adding to the sum total of utility in society, then you are really on board.

How is it possible that purposely damaging goods helps a society? The premise, as Varian explains it, is that segments of the market that it would not be profitable to serve at all are put in play by versioning. In general, companies need to create the illusion of premium values among what are essentially the same products in order to get people who are willing to spend more to pay as much as possible. (Branding can play a big role in that procedure, especially with things like corn flakes and bar soaps, cases in which the generic and the branded product are more or less indistinguishable.) The process makes asymmetrical information not the bane of markets, as Akerlof suggested in his "Market for Lemons" paper, but instead a boon of added efficiency for creating profitable price differentials.

What I found disconcerting about Varian's analysis is his casual aside that "the low-willingness-to-pay consumer always ends up with zero surplus" in the model of versioning he pursues, so they "can safely be ignored in the welfare calculations." Maybe I am misunderstanding, but doesn't that mean this model basically ignore the possibility of redistribution of surplus to the "less willing to pay" a.k.a. the poor? "Willingness to pay" seems like a euphemism for "can't afford to pay because too broke" -- a convenient means for evading that particular question of what makes people more or less willing to pay in certain situations, of building in the dubious assumption of consumer sovereignty (the consumer decides what they will do, and the market responds accordingly) directly into the model.

And then then in employing the model itself, Varian sees it as a victory for all of society when producers and rich people (oops, I mean those with a high willingness to pay) accrue more of the social surplus on account of the fact that the total pie has become bigger. When producers make more profit, is that a win for society? If you believe that profit somehow trickles down and around and throughout society, then I guess so. Producers and consumers are basically the same people from a macro perspective. The idea is that more people making and buying more things is inherently good, no matter who is doing the buying and selling. This conflation of social surplus (i.e. profits) with social welfare, though, is the same kind of thinking that would have us ignore growing income inequality in cases when the lower classes' income growth is not totally stagnant (but just relatively so).

It also helps your conversion to an economistic outlook if you buy into Pareto efficiency as being the basis of ethics, the core method for determining fairness in a society. If no one can be be made better off without any one else having been made worse off as a result, then Pareto efficiency has been achieved. From a non-economist's view, the problem with this ethical measure is that being better or worse off are relative concepts that are constantly in flux and rely a great deal on the information participants have. I'm not any worse off when I'm flying next to someone who paid have as much as I did for a fare until they tell me about it. In "Markets and Freedoms" Amartya Sen points out that "Pareto efficiency is completely unconcerned with distribution of utilities (or of incomes or anything else), and is quite uninterested in equity." Most people, however, are interested in those things, and don't like to see them discarded in favor of output maximization.

Anyway, Varian's prescription for versioning informational goods reminded me of the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic book reader that many people seem to be quite taken with. I haven't used one, but it sounds like an oversize BlackBerry with less functionality. Varian writes: "The first point is the most fundamental: make sure that you design the product so that it can be versioned. That is, the product should be designed in a way that it is easy to reduce its quality in order to sell to a particular market segment." The fact that the Kindle is WiFi enabled but only allows users to connect to the internet through its proprietary system and access only its sales catalog is an indication of Kindle's success on that score. Kindle is out to set the terms of e-book reading so that it could implement differential price schemes on the fly: "If the owner of the content controls the browser, then it can choose the features of the browser to enhance the quality of consuming the content.... Controlling the browser allows the seller of content to increase the quality of what it is selling."

I'm not a long-term skeptic about electronic books -- I'm not sentimental about the magic of propping books open and smelling the wood pulp and feeling the grain of the page under my fingers and all that. (I tend to think about what a pain it is to eat and read anything but a magazine at the same time.) But I have a strong inclination to wait until the version of the Kindle comes out that is not locked down, forcing me to pay for information I could get free with WiFi, and giving me only one option for where I can go to replenish my supply of reading material. I'm waiting for the model that is basically a hand-held computer. So I'm hoping the tenets of versioning don't prevent that device from ever being made.

Digital books (29 August 2007)

Why would anyone buy a digital book reader? I found myself asking this question while reading this somewhat nonsensically titled BusinessWeek piece, "Making Digital Books into Page Turners." (Huh? I guess they thought best-seller and head turner were too cliche, so they went for an only tangentially related set phrase. Does "Turning the Page on Digital Books" make more sense?)

The market for digital books is nascent, and Sony, despite the Reader's less-than-splashy debut, still sees its potential, believing people will eventually warm to reading on a flat screen everything from books to the magazine you're holding now.

The strange thing is, I've already got a machine that can do this, and in fact I read those very words on its screen. I wasn't holding a magazine at all! No, I'm not a magician or a time traveler from the future; I've got this thing called a "laptop" and it can do many other neat things beside display the pages of a book. It displays these things called "web pages" that have all sorts of information on them, and I can even use what's known as a "search engine" to find just about any information I want. When prices of cheap laptops are going ever downward, who the hell wants a stupid toy that only displays proprietary pages? What was in Sony's mind, besides greed, when it decided to limit its digital reader to its files alone? When will media companies get it that no one is going to pay for digital information the way they did for collectible things?

Book buyers like to collect things; reading the books is somewhat incidental. If they wanted merely to read, they could go to library. And no one likes reading on screens; they will do it however if the content is free. They are never, ever, going to pay the same amount for a digital book, as Sony seems to expect, as they would for a real one -- they will not pay for the eyestrain and the absence of an object to arrange on their bookshelves. Only when real books cost $150 will people consent to explore the possibilities of digital ones for $20. And at that point, people will have mastered the art of distributing books as pdfs anyway. I'm sure you could search torrent sites now for pdfs of just about any best-seller as well as just about any magazine. People will go to the trouble if its free. If they wanted to pay, they would buy the actual object. So this makes no sense:

To stoke sales, Sony has knocked $50 off its original price for the Reader and rolled out a new print ad campaign in publications such as The New York Times (NYT ), USA Today, and Vanity Fair. As part of this marketing push, Sony is offering new buyers, who are also registered Connect users, credit for 100 free classic titles, such as Great Expectations and Moby-Dick. "In terms of timing, with people going back to school, there is a lot of interest in classic literature," said Jim Malcolm, director of marketing for Sony Electronics. "It gives people an incentive to buy."

But you can download classic novels, for which there is no copyright, for free already. You can get many of them in cheap print editions as well.

Perhaps Sony has seen what digital music has done to company balance sheet and are trying to get ahead of the curve. The digital-music-marketplace logic seems to be this: when distribution costs zero, you only have to sell a few to be profitable. So then if you can guilt some small proportion of the public into paying for digital content with the intellectual-property boogeyman or the specter of your crack legal team, you might still have a viable business. But music and books are not particularly comparable goods. Music affords an immediate experience and often serves as a backdrop for setting a mood or manifesting an identity. Books require attention, a commodity becoming rarer all the time. When people have the attention to pay, they'll invest it in such a way to maximize the pleasure and utility it affords them -- that means getting comfortable with a printed book, or getting utilitarian with a wide array of digital materials to that may be cut and pasted and reincorporated in whatever it is the user is trying to accomplish.