the return of FotB
Following an extended migration cut-over we have returned. Some postings were dissipated but here is a news summary.
The age of missing information; postings of December 2nd and November 27 evaporated in the cut-over. The Google cache is so attentive that it overwrote the drop-out within 24 hours .compromising any back-up logic in redundant cache posting. Of course FotB maintains hard copy archive as well
Anyway, the news was that we returned from Arequipa after submitting a plan for preservation and setting in motion the funding and implemetation of summer project workers. The flight of the condor has just begun. The church libraries of Arequipa house collections spanning five centuries including materials produced in Peru where printing was introduced in the 16th century. Three summers of project preservation should assure us of collection and historical library persistence across the next three centuries.
The other positings related to Kindle, NEA reading assessment and the interesting news that the old testament was written down after the new testament which had to do with communication technology risk taking.
“The Torah as thus a transendent reality embodied in two earthly forms: a written scripture and an oral tradition. Both came from God; both were necessary, but the rabbis priviledged the Oral Torah because a written text could encourage inflexibility and backward-looking orientation, whereas the spoken word and the ever-shifting currents of human thought made the Word more sensitive to changing conditions.” Karen Armstrong from her book The Bible
This is an inverted, but relevant metaphor for our own transitions. In late Antiquity writing was the new technology and what we would call blogging or oral transaction was the old.
reality check
“What’s really going to happen is that the real and the virtual will blur together, become indistinguishable, as more of our experience becomes computer-generated. Eventually, there won’t be any reality to escape from.”
Nicholas Carr
What fabric will this be? The mediated presentations will interplay with unmediated, intended meaning will mix with the unintended meaning and the mastering and back-up formats will fluctuate with their own simulations. These are exactly the interactive roles already pioneered by the print book.
What do we know? The physical codex is uninhibited by mediations since it comes directly to hand and eye while at the same time book discovery and parsing is easily mediated, layer on layer, by screen utilities. It is rich both in author’s and publisher’s intended meaning as well as in unintended meanings of its material and cultural nature. The codex is also a reliable performer in both mastering and back-up roles to augment its own simulations on the screen. In these respects the codex in its print format is a comprehensive medium for transmission of knowledge.
Today screen delivered works are transacted through many hand-offs of recording, processing, transmission, decoding, and rendering. But note that the layers of mediation, not the format are in flux. We layer on this mediation not necessarily to deliberately distance our selves from the direct experience of real books or live music. We layer on the mediations because we construe the mediations themselves to be new and preferred formats. This is some kind of conceptual buffer, and perhaps deception, at work.
“Texts are material artifacts that take many different forms: cave paintings, tattoos, stone tablets, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, manuscript books, musical scores, maps, printed books, engravings, newspapers, photographs, films, DVDs, computers.”
This excerpt from the blurb for
HOTT (History of Text Technologies) suggests more concerning the taxonomy of media. Not only is the array differently mediated to the senses (try reading a film or DVD by looking at them) but there is at least one other layer in the taxonomy. Which examples embed their text in a presentation format that itself is as rich in unintended material and cultural meaning as it is in authorial and publisher meaning?