Imagine waking up tomorrow morning

and all the music has disappeared.

…What is more you cannot even remember

what music sounded like or how it was made.

You can only remember that it had existed and that it

had been important to you and your civilisation.

And you long to hear it once more.

Then imagine people coming together to make music

with nothing but their voices, and with no knowledge of

what music should sound like.

For Bill Drummond, this leap of the imagination leads into his project The 17. But it is still an act of the imagination.  For Nehemiah & Blake, this state already exists in many people with regards to spiritual literacy in the prophetic voice of the Bible.  To paraphrase The 17,

You wake up each morning

to a world in which the prophetic word has disappeared.

…What is more, you cannot even remember

what the prophetic world sounded like or how it was uttered.

You can only remember that it had existed and that it

had been important to you and you civilisation.

The question is, do you long to hear it once more?

What Nehemiah & Blake desires to achieve is to bring together writers like you who can answer yes to the question above. And despite your having no knowledge of what the prophetic voice sounds like, to come together and learn to hear and write that word together.

“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.

Once Biggles and Just William captured the imagination of teenage boys – now computer games and texting seem to occupy their time.

As Ian Rankin notes on the programme, texting and following the prompts of computer games “is a form of literacy among teenage boys.” Anyone familiar or not with the language of texting knows that that reading a txt msg is an act of interpretation. Texting foregrounds the fact that reading itself is an act of interpretation, a fact sometimes lost on those of us who are “literate” in the intricacies of standardised phonetics. Interpretation is therefore a core element of literacy, and the level of interpretation closely related to the level of literacy.

Considering how thorny the issue of textual interpretation is in any field of knowledge, a low level of literacy premises a dangerous thing. While for many young boys leaving the UK education system with a reading age of eleven, the dangerous thing looming is poverty, a classified internal MI5 report on radicalisation in the UK finds another dangerous low level of literacy at work in the UK:

Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices.

It is notable that the MI5 use of the terms radicalisation and violent extremism refer to (Islamic) terrorism. But these terms could equally apply to boys leaving school with a reading age of eleven and finding there way into gangland lives. In both cases, it is the inability to interpret with a level of sophistication the texts by which they are able to interpret the world that creates the dangerous circumstance for themselves and their communities.

the internet vs. the book

the book vs. the medieval manuscript

ergo, the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript

…

Much is going on around the blogosphere regarding Nick Carr’s essay in Atlantic magazine, “Is Google making us stupid?“.  Nehemiah & Blake has commented.  Kevin Kelly’s post, Fate of the Book, provides a very useful perspective of the internet vs. the book debate as it has developed since the mid 1990s.  Sven Birkerts, to whom Kelly’s post was directed, makes the interesting point that “[c]yberspace is centrifugal; reading is centripetal.  Nehemiah & Blake, however, would like to refocus the internet/book debate somewhat by considering the medieval manuscript.  (btw, the start of this interesting train of links comes from booktwo.org, a wonderful site focussed on the future on the book.)

There is a lot to be said for considering old technologies in order to get one’s head around new technologies, particularly if one takes a circular view of history. Consider the following.

Each medieval manuscript was made up of folios or pages to create an individual object. No two manuscripts were the same. Furthermore, manuscripts often linked together otherwise unrelated narratives for the pleasure of the reader. For instance, the only surviving manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is bound together with two Latin treatises and the Christian narrative poems Pearl, Purity and Patience. A manuscript would also have been transcribed, glossed and illuminated by one or more scribes, each of whom would have made errors in their work. The work of the rubicators – those who would write the glosses and headings – would furthermore have reflected their individual idiosyncrasies, as would the transcribing methods of the scribes and the artistic methods of the illuminators.

Altogether, the medieval manuscript would be everything a printed book was not: non-uniform. It was print culture that imposed upon our reading habits the conventions of uniformity that we demand of our books today. No publisher today publishes more than one version of a novel. Imagine the furore today if Bloomsbury published two versions of a Harry Potter book simultaneously. Readers would want to know which was the “authorative” version.

Now consider the web site. It too is made up of individual pages (each with its own url) that are (hyper)linked together to form an individual object. The web site is non-reproducible. The idea of reproducing an identical web site elsewhere on the web is not only pointless (one home url is sufficient for anyone to access your page), but impossible (any copy requires different url’s for each page it duplicates). Moreover, the website can link together any number of disparate web pages from across the internet through the use of the hyperlink. But no website is very likely to have the same agglomeration of links.

Carrying on the similarities, while many websites do aim to reproduce the uniformity of the book across its pages, particularly those with dedicated webmasters, the majority of the deep web is produced by content creators who are less concerned with uniformity and more interested in the delivery of information, allowing for a vast scope for error, idiosyncrasy, opinion and design ethic to enter into the flow of information.

There are other similarities, just as their are many dissimilarities between the medieval manuscript and the internet. Feel free to comment and mention any you might think of. Nevertheless, the similarities in terms of production between the respective technologies I think warrants the investigation of the older technology that Nehemiah & Blake seeks to pursue.

It is the same case for many many good writers. The problem is not a shortage of publishers. The problem is the distribution system whose focus is on bottom line. Writers, as a result, go unpublished because they live outside or on the extremities of the distribution system. Their God-given gift to write starves because they are unable to use (for a number of varying reasons) their talents and resources to enter into that system. If they are able to enter it, they receive next to nothing from it.

Nehemiah & Blake believes however that to be hindered or not allowed to exercise one’s God-given talents for an equitable wage on the basis on market economics is wrong. In other words, Nehemiah & Blake believes that if you discover your primary vocation to be that of a writer, but find out that your writing does not conform to the wants of market economics, you should nevertheless be allowed to practice, develop, master and live by your writing. Nehemiah & Blake believes this on the basis that your gift for writing is God-given, and would have not been so given, unless it was meant to be the work by which to sustain your life.

While many independent publishers exist that do a fine job of publishing “difficult” writers, very few can provide their writers a “working wage”. It is for this reason that Nehemiah & Blake is setting up a “not-for-profit” publishing venture focussed on investigating the medieval monastery model as a means by which writers can primarily write for a living while being supported by a community, so that the writers can in turn support the community through the fruit of their writing.

A twofold consequence of the dissolution of the monasteries is that it 1) began to put to rest the art of manuscript production, and 2) ended a particular tradition of spiritual writing.  This tradition is bound up in the nature of producing manuscripts.  Yet it is also explicitly tied to the medium of the monastery.  Caedmon, England’s great mystical writers, the Venerable Bede, and the many unknown scribes who produced England’s illuminated manuscripts, all of them were “produced” by the monastery model.  When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he ended that tradition.

The vision of Nehemiah & Blake is to resurrect that tradition in the context of contemporary England.  The vision is not to slavishly try reproduce that model, but rather to discover it, probe it, question it, understand it and seek to find an equitable way in which the conditions that produced this kind of writing in England then can be transposed to the present to reproduce a similar kind of writing today for Nehemiah & Blake to publish.  But the vision is larger than that.  It wishes also to replicate for communities in England today, the benefits that the monasteries and abbeys provided for their communities.

Nehemiah & Blake has only the smallest inclination of what these conditions might be and might have been, but future blog posts will go towards exploring this topic.  Any suggestions, insights or comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

“For book publishers, the mission is to make an industry built on a fifteenth-century technology viable in the twenty-first century. That means reinventing the concept of the book for the digital age.”

The book is the object.  That does not change.  It is how the book is conceptualised that makes all the difference.  Is a book a bunch of printed pages bound within a cover?  Or is a book a touchstone for a community to gather around, or build on, or circulate?

“…are emoticon-laden screeds and homemade YouTube videos going to save “the book” or just further our cultural transition away from print literacy?”

In other words, will readers of “books” create the internet-based user-generated content based on the book to provide the community with what it needs to survive, and thus for books to survive?  Or will that very user-generated content sever whatever tenuous link to print culture there may have been?

“The book is a souvenir.”

One buys a souvenir to remember a place visited or an event attended.  In the case of book, one is often led to buy a book by virtue of a conversation with an empassioned reader, or in response to being exposed to a book or author during some form of human communication.  Ray Bradbury will indelibly be linked in this memory to an English class at high school.

“[Readers are] seeking an intellectual connection with an author and a community experience organized around an idea.

I think there is a lot of validity to this point.  Many people must have read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code not because they thought it was going to be a great read but because they wanted to part of that phenomenon.

“‘I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather information, and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process.’” – Tim O’ Reilly

The idea of curating a book rather than publishing a book is quite neat.  It widens it beyond just the printing and binding of paper.  A book is an event which needs to be curated, involving many of the aspects that would go into curating an arts show.

“…the writers of the future (both fiction and nonfiction) will work with Web designers, software writers, and other professionals to create product.”

This is inevitable.  As internet fiction finds its voice, different programs and applications are going to be needed to meet the demands of the “text” in conveying the story.  Even for Apocalypse of Jude, a web designer was used to create the site.

“The idea that the practice and craft of writing can simply retool itself for the digital age overlooks the fact that the Web is giving rise to totally unique forms of expression, a writing that is different from the kind traditionally found in books.”

It’s true that the novel will never “retool” itself for the web.  New forms of writing will emerge.  But I still believe that the practice and craft of writing remains as core.   The writer needs to find new forms of expression. The practice and craft of writing will adapt to those new forms.  But they will remain as practice and craft.

“…written material will likely never regain the cultural primacy it enjoyed in earlier centuries.”

Agreed.

“Just because things became written down, we didn’t lose oral culture.”

Also true.

“Arguing against the forces of digitalization is as much a losing battle as cursing the coming of the evening tide. But before we invest ourselves too deeply in this future, consider this: If new technologies expose the biases inherent in print and text, so the converse is true as well; that the written word is uniquely suitable for revealing the myopias of our digital age. If poor old Oliver Goldsmith were alive today, he might argue that critical reading abilities, cultural literacy, and traditional literacy were never more vital than the present.”

An interesting thing about early Medieval culture is that it was the monks who safeguarded much of the knowledge of the time with their literacy skills, conveying that knowledge through a visual literacy coded into the liturgy, stone carvings, frescoes and stained-glass windows.  Perhaps there is a sense in which the same is happening again, in which a highly literate minority need to code that knowledge into visual literacies of a post-literate world.  Writers need coders.

“However, before we make the mistake of convincing ourselves that a knack for writing software is more valuable than the ability to simply write well, we might consider looking anew at the souvenir that is the book.”

Hopefully, these short comments on the quotes pulled will encourage that looking anew.