Digital Bibliography

(This entry is a response I posted to Alex Reid’s post, “Atemporality in the Digital Humanities” on his blog Digital Digs. He’s responding to Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality and the Creative Artist” as well as Alex Halavais’s post on “worn technologies.” I re-post it here because it helps me think through some of the ways that book-futurists historicize the currently fluid and volatile changes in book-technologies. Mostly, I’ve been coming to understand that most book futurists, like Bolter, Lanham, and Landow, among others, to some degree argue that the long histories of the book don’t yield much in the way of understanding (not to mention participating in) the near or far-reaching future of books. Hopefully, I’ll make those arguments more specifically in (much) later blog posts. For now, though, in the following post, I try to come to terms, as generously as I can, with an alarming tendency to argue for un-historical approaches to understanding the future of the book. Here’s my comment on Alex’s post…)

You know, I’ve always been kind of off-put by the "get-it" sort of rhetorical snicker like the one Sterling drops. I’ve always felt that it creates a cool-kids/nerds binary or a paying-attention/oblivious binary. And when I don’t fully ‘get-it,’ I feel a bit condescended to. I only mention this to foreground some of my own resistance to Sterling ideas. My most strenuous attempt to ‘get’ the ‘it’ of what he’s saying suggests he is arguing for an un-historical (as opposed to an ahistorical approach). One that rejects the usefulness of historicizing contemporary problems.

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