The World in a Blog- or Book- Part I

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."
-St. Augustine

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor… While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
-Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

From the early days of the printing press to our present day experiences with electronic media and Internet publishing, ideas of space and time are directly related to the way they have been expressed, preserved and circulated through physically reproducible artifacts, like printed books, as well as more recent "immaterial", electronic forms. In this essay, I would like to address some ideas relating to the spatial and temporal consequences of two communications technologies, namely, the printed book as it might have been circulated and received after the introduction of the first printing press; and the popular and educational adoption of the electronic web log, or "blog" in the latter half of twentieth-century. Writings by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Benedict Anderson offer two different perspectives on book reading, writing, and reception, while Manfred Steger’s definition of globalization and my own personal experience of maintaining a blog inform how I consider the latter type of media.

Before discussing the texts, however, I would like to define “technology” as a concept that is not limited to definitions of "hardware" or "equipment", or any kind of "material" construction devoid of human interaction; nor is technological development or understood as a linear process of scientific research, technical innovation and public adoption. Rather, I adopt Pinch & Bijker's idea of the social construction of technology, and their description of a sociology of technology as the "explanandum, not the explanans" for "the success of an artifact" (406), as a way of thinking about the book and the blog. Technology should be considered from an understanding of "a body of knowledge and a social system" and embedded in multiple historical processes and discourses (Layton 210). Lastly, in the spirit of Eisenstein’s conjectures, I would like to put forth some conjectures of mine regarding blogging as a social practice, and “doing history” with the blog as an intellectual one.

Benedict Anderson and Elizabeth Eisenstein present interpretations on the consequences of the printed book with somewhat overlapping historical and geographic foci. Eisenstein concerns much of her study with differentiation and divergence across the Western European populations who read, authored, published, governed or oversaw the process of print and distribution. As a historian, she attempts to overturn prior historical tendencies of generalizing the standardization and accessibility of print shortly after the invention of the printing press. Using innumerable and often contradictory examples, Eisenstein argues that the effects of print media did not necessarily impact the general population of Europe on an even, measurable scale. Many of the events and perceptual shifts she describes happened as “a large cluster of relatively simultaneous, interrelated changes” (2). In her research, she postulates that printed media led to the development of regional networks of printers and their various clients, and to diverse populations of the literate and casual book-reader throughout Europe (Eisenstein 5). Typographical fixity, image reproduction and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information allowed for scientific maps and texts to be distributed, cross-referenced, and standardized in format or content; at the same time, new hybrids of texts from old and new books came into existence (Eisenstein 8). New kinds of workers, such as compositors, were needed to meet the demand for printed works, and new categories of readers and writers, such as the writer-aristocrat, were also becoming apparent in the “age of incunabala”. Many of the groups of people involved in the creation and dissemination of texts, such as printers, scholars and priests, experienced dimensions and consequences of print media that were not applicable to book-reading populations. Literature intended for very specific audiences, such as texts on childrearing and etiquette, law, and esoteric religion and philosophy, was produced at much higher quantity than before (Eisenstein 40).

In comparison to Eisenstein’s examination of the variances, subgroups and networks of readers, writers, publishers, and other populations involved in the supply and demand of printed texts, Anderson offers up a novel interpretation of the printed book and the beginnings of print capitalism as agents of burgeoning national consciousness. The narrative world of books and what he calls “print-language” is presented as a linguistic innovation and a psychological paradigm for populations to imagine themselves as part of the emerging community of the nation. As Anderson states, “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed in their secular, particular invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44). Print-language preserved in a portable, visual and somewhat unchanging form, and distribution of books to a reading public (however segmented in occupation or socioeconomic strata), created fields of commonality and shared identity. New forms of narrative shifted temporal perception from ideas of omniscience and “simultaneity-along-time” in the medieval period to “empty, homogeneous time…measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 24).