the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript

August 8, 2008 at 6:13 pm · Filed under Medieval monastery model, Publishing industry and tagged: internet publishing, manuscripts

a theory:

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.

Comments