Stephen Bayley ends a recent article on DDR design with the following comment:

“The greatest legacy of the Cold War? [...] [I]t’s the internet, a system designed to secure free movement of the US command structure’s data in the event of a Soviet missile attack.” (italics mine).

That is the nature of the internet: to allow for the accumulation and free movement of data in order to facilitate another end altogether.  In an article for Harper’s Magazine, August 1995 entitled “What are we doing on-line?”, when the internet was commercially in its infancy, Sven Birkerts critically noted that

“[t]he supreme capability that this particular chip-driven silicon technology has is to transfer binary units of information. And therefore, as it takes over the world, it privileges those units of information. When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.”

This view, however, is one that tends to see soul intrinsic to content, when it is not.  Soul belongs to human beings.  Once upon a time in western thought, we adhered to the belief that the word was imbued with being.  What was forgotten was that the Word became flesh, and that the Word is a person, and not a book. Data is information, and, where once the printing press freed up the movement of that information for people to make up their own minds about God, now the internet is doing it.  What is different is the medium in which this information is carried.

The book as a self-contained unit puts borders around the information it carries.  To make use of that information, one must invest much time in mining a book for what profit it can produce.  The physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual bond that is created between the reader and the book leads to misjudgement that somehow this book carries soul-data, when in fact it has merely facilitated the nourishment of the soul.

The internet on the other hand, places no such borders on its information, and where such borders might be found to exist, seeks to tear them down through integration and mash-ups so that disparate strands of data can come together in increasingly complex formulations of data that reveal seams of knowledge as yet untapped.

Konica Minolta have been working on a project to unravel the mysteries of the statue of Venus de Milo.  They write,

“Recreating the Venus de Milo on our computers allowed us to make a very detailed examination of all aspects of the sculpture.  We were able to see things invisible to the naked eye, and to visualize possible shapes and poses of the original statue. We were making a fresh discovery: a previously unknown beauty.” (italics mine)

While books will remain a medium of their own, and continue to hold to themselves the mystique they have so generously earned, perhaps it is time for us to throw our many many books, the making of which there is no ending, into the particle generator that is post-modernity and send them spinning round until they smash into each other.  When they do, let us then be there to collect the information freed from these collisions and allow our understanding of this ever deepening mystery of creation to be drawn on into new spheres of data for the nourishment of our souls.