Bush’s work is quite possibly one of the most artful discussions I’ve ever seen of the future of technology. It is an incredible document, mentioning not only the state of technology as he knew it, but also describing what he viewed as the future. It comes at an interesting time period- what we now know as the end of World War II he did not yet know. He postulates that the next war may be less focused on scientists creating instruments for war, and unfortunately he couldn’t have predicted that the creation of the computers he talks about were first created and used as a tool for war with the Cold War in the late 50s and early 60s. This has, of course, seriously affected the direction that computing went, and in my belief is part of our currently stunted growth computationally (at least, from the side of the common user).

The problems he poses are ones that, to an extent, we have yet to solve. We are still unable to aggregate the sheer amount of published information in a way that is both useful and efficient, however we are getting much better at it. This is still true, though, for older documents that may not have been stored with best practices, and is especially the case both for social media and in the age of the ever-evolving internet.

There are additionally many cases that Bush accidentally? predicts the future of technology. There are many times I found myself saying “well, yeah he’s right!”

“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

He essentially predicts what would become to Go-Pro, although he couldn’t have possibly predicted the digital age. He discusses his belief that technology would rapidly improve, as it had been at the time, but even Moore’s Law has unfortunately seemed incorrect in our age. I’m interested in further exploring why his predictions for our interactions with note-taking don’t quite line up (why we’re still directly interacting with typewriting); my theory is that this is related to the concept of legacy features of technology being incorporated to make it easier for legacy users to pick up new technologies, which he doesn’t discuss (it seems that this wasn’t a practice at the time). He correctly predicts, even, fields where this automated technology may come to be of use, like in finance or math, particularly with regard to logic.

“Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students’ souls.”

He also discusses the all-too-familiar difficulty in finding written material relevant to your research at a library; a problem which, for some, is no longer an issue, however there are some folks like historians who still struggle very much with the digital availability of material.

There are plenty of things, although, that we haven’t quite streamlined in the way he’d hoped, like the department store problem; we still have to enter lots of different information into different little systems that are largely not interconnected in a helpful way. He also touches upon the fact that humans and computers were likely (and now we know, are in fact) going to be too different logically speaking–that humans would have to learn to interact with computers instead of the other way around.

Nearing the end, he addresses the concept of the Memex- a sort of all-performing desk for every task you could possibly need to research. And while this is relatively different from the phones and laptops we have, it really does descriptively emulate the computer desks and systems of the latter half of the 1900s (a phrase which makes me deeply nauseated).

Simply put, Bush is full of love for technology and research, and it really shows. As a work, this is fascinating for both its writing and its historicity. However, my final note is that it is also a DH piece, with this final quote:

“There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

There certainly is. I think he’d be proud.

A/N: My apologies for the lateness, the holidays and this journal article I had to submit ran up against each other and my schedule fell apart like a wet sandwich.

Prior to this project, I honestly didn’t really pay much mind to audiobooks. I’ve listened to a few, and I knew about all the arguments in the various communities that claim rights to audiobooks as a media type, but I thought they were all too dry to pay much attention to and didn’t really grip me.

What I found from our own audiobook is that, the way we mixed audio in really actually reminded me of podcasting, to the point that in my own notes I kept accidentally writing “10/17 – DH720 blog post about podcast due” and suchlike. I think podcasts really have a much greater tendency towards using soundscapes in a way that audiobooks usually don’t, perhaps due to its history in radio rather than the very oral (“mom and dad telling me a story” oral) history of audiobooks. My parents always tried to stay true to the text, unless they were doing voices when a character was described a certain way. I was taught in my Speech and Debate class in high school and numerous acting classes that, when reading Shakespeare, you must pronounce ellipses. It’s a strange concept to me that feels very unnatural, however in our audiobook (I almost wrote ‘podcast’ again) Sean and the editors manage to make those pauses or drawn out noises feel smooth. My theory, in terms of the philosophy of whether audiobooks are just radio or podcasts or that podcasts are radio etc, is that a lot of these differences come down to the use of soundscapes and adherence to the text. Dramatic readings of Tumblr posts, as per my previous blog, then, are definitely audiobooks due to a lack of relevant soundscaping and relatively strict adherence to the text. This differs from podcasts, which involve quite a bit of soundscaping and are not necessarily based in any text. However, they are not audiobooks in the sense that they lack the air of overconfidence and pretentiousness that comes with audiobook culture.

I definitely came away with a better appreciation for Hemingway, that’s for sure. He’s a trip. His life was wild, and his writing was also pretty wild. His early work, as we read, reads way differently from his later work… his later work has less of that youthful fire.

As far as my role is concerned, audiobooks aren’t exactly my forte, but I know I’m quite the presenter, so I felt the role fit me well and I was able to help in a way that suited the group. I did wish I could’ve been more apart of some of the decision making about the audiobook, but honestly I got so lost when I tried to understand what they meant that I just stood back and watched the geniuses work! The real advantage of being a presenter rather than an editor or something was that I got to see the audiobook from an almost outside perspective, while already being familiar with the source material to an extent. I think it gave me a lot of additional perspective and understanding that improved my “reading” of the text.

I’m honestly surprised at how this group was able to turn something I considered dry into something I felt was worth a listen. Go team!

A/N: Natalie and I were coworking when we wrote these blog posts, so if you see any similar ideas, it’s because we had a conversation! Also, I remembered that read more tags exist so y’all can handle my long ass posts. Cheers!

First, a defense:

When considering what audiobook I wanted to do for this assignment, I had to first question what counts as an audiobook. Because obviously, knowing me, I can’t just do something easy; I have to sit here and question whether Tumblr posts count as a work of fiction. And I decided that hell yeah they do. First of all, they’re quite literally fiction (usually), but also they’ve created a large cultural canon. Tumblr users know these posts by heart, primarily auditorily (which I’ll explain why in a moment), and seek to locate and preserve them for future Internet users all around. In its heyday (the 2010s), Tumblr posts most often spread orally when offline/”IRL”, I can only assume due to wifi only slowly beginning to spread to public spaces and data still being LTE, but I truly couldn’t tell you precisely why. A major part of Tumblr culture is dramatic readings, perhaps because of the oral retellings of posts. These dramatic readings are exactly what they sound like- people read posts aloud a la Shakespearean monologues. Nowadays many Tumblr posts are hard to find; there are actually whole accounts dedicated to archiving historic Tumblr posts (especially ones that created phrases that are now used as references in speech to key people into the fact that they’re in one fandom or another, or a Tumblr user in general, such as “I like your shoelaces”).

Here, I present a video from four years ago (that I actually watched when it came out, so this video and I have some history) of dramatic readings of “3am” Tumblr posts (AKA posts that are unhinged like someone suffering from lack of sleep).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShbp0jfQ9U

The creator, PM Seymour, is a hobby voice actor whose MO on YouTube who makes a lot of this sort of thing; he mostly reads out posts from Tumblr for this purpose of giving them to another medium to share and further document, and boy is he good at it. Seymour puts on a wide variety of voices and tones to illustrate these posts. Unlike traditional novels, Tumblr posts typically don’t have any cues that tell the reader how to perceive their speech, so Seymour adds an additional layer of characterization of to the speaker in the post with his voice acting. He’s been voice acting since 2011 with professional equipment, and started posting to his YouTube channel shortly after his voice acting career began, so his YouTube channel has fairly good production value aside from the graphic quality. He characterizes primarily by how the user types their message, with CAPS LOCK BEING SCREAMING, FOR EXAMPLE. He also assigns gender seemingly arbitrarily and tone in absence of indicators, adding a lot to the text and how it’s interpreted. Posts that I personally wouldn’t have found funny before I find funny when he reads them because of this. It is also in this way that he tends to deviate from the text, especially by adding funny vocal effects like screams (I promise it’s funnier than it sounds). It is in this way that his dramatic readings are not only transformative/transforming the text posts into a different medium, but he’s also adding an element to the existing fiction that I’d argue as before makes them audio’books’. Though, I suppose that that’s not really what makes audiobooks audiobooks, because they don’t have to be transformative in that way- they just have to read the thing out loud. Something to think about for the future…

A/N: I’d like to formally apologize for the length.

I started my reading for today’s class with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books” and felt immediately at home in the topic Price is discussing. I’ve so recently found myself a Master’s student in Digital Humanities, which, being a humanities, has quite a bit of reading involved. And therein lies the problem… I don’t generally read. Now, of course, I just said “I started my reading” so perhaps I’m being too critical of myself. I read. I read some. I definitely read more now than I did last year. But I certainly don’t read in the way I did when I was a child hopped up on Adderall. I could spend this entire blog post lamenting “the ADHD generation” and how none of us can focus anymore and it’s an epidemic blah blah blah. Or I could talk about how awesome, yet tinged with a hint of sadness, it is to see librarians advocating for anything that has words in it to count as reading (see here – seen at Decatur Library, Alabama). Which, as a brief aside: I love libraries. I love how they are becoming a space that is truly public and has everything as Price talks about. I think it’s a beautiful thing. And I think it’s interesting how she’s bringing in all these statistics that say in the 20-teens that reading was actually on the up-and-up again, and without even Googling it I know that in the aftermath of 2020 reading climbed its way back up to the top of entertainment. I think it’s also worth another blog post entirely of its own to discuss how bound books are combatting the ephemerality of the Internet.

But what I actually want to talk about is based on my experience as a Linguist: reading is not natural.

Yeah, I said it. Reading isn’t natural to humans. Spoken word far predates written word by a few thousand years or so. Writing was often restricted to the highest classes and their scribes for most of early history. Of course, this all changed with the printing press. When all this knowledge that had previously been restricted to a certain class of people with private tutors became essentially public, it fundamentally revolutionized how learning itself works. Instead of needing to apprentice with someone in your field, you could read books on your own and become an autodidact, which many societies quite admired (as tough as it is to be successful that way) as we still do today in the Western world. So, reading became the standard. Now, however, we’re seeing a return to the spoken word. Written word takes time that we in our late-stage capitalist era haven’t much of. Written word takes effort that we can’t sacrifice. Price talks about the ‘myth of exceptionalism’—the idea that we’re not living in the ‘unprecedented age’ we believe we live in. She continues to talk about the rise of TV, and the rise of radio, and this is exactly what we’re living through all over again. When these new technologies become widely available, we see people shift to using them more than books, and then books prevail once again after those technologies have been around for a while. But personally, as I’ve said in my topic sentence, I believe this is because audio technology is, for most of us, more natural to us than reading. What we’re also seeing, though, is remnants of the original mentality that the Internet was this thing that was… well, cringe, because it was for nerds. Ew, nerds! Who would want to be educated?! Losers. You read fanfiction that’s longer than any book you’ve ever read? And it’s about some… fictional characters?! Laaaaame. That’s not real reading.

What I’m talking about, dear readers, is the ever-present gatekeeping. Why it is that humans like to cage their stuff up so much for no one else to enjoy I’ll never be certain. But reading (not books) is thoroughly gatekept. Books themselves are old news. Widely available, widely owned. But reading can only be done in books—if you do it anywhere else you’re doing it wrong! Truth of the matter is, those librarians are right: all reading is reading. As Price calls it: the myth of the ideal reader. However, there is something to be said for the art of the written word. Graphic novels don’t have that, most often they have the art of… well, art, more so than they do the written word. Magazines aren’t known for it, though there are some particularly good pieces I’ve read in The Atlantic. I’m getting side-tracked, but point is: if it’s ‘easy’ to understand and readily available, it’s not books, and so it’s not reading.

Reading, and reading of specifically books, is equivocated with intelligence just as it had been pre-printing press and now post-so. If reading becomes widely available, and no longer so gatekept, it can’t be a mark of intelligence… how can it be that someone who reads exclusively grocery store romance novels is intelligent? Simply impossible! Preposterous! Not all of us can be blessed with such intelligence as to be capable of reading. As Price says, “this [is] the latest version of the centuries-old attempt to distinguish trashy escapism from intellectually challenging and therefore morally respectable fiction”. But the reality is that with the advent of public schooling, reading became not only common amongst all classes but also second-nature. We as a people became more intelligent because we were more educated. But on that note…

The notion that Google makes us stupid is absolutely ridiculous. What we’re actually doing is reducing our memory recall, which… well, we don’t always need it anymore. And that’s totally fine. There are people who work on upping their memory recall for things like trivia shows or to prevent dementia. Personally, I think it’s a fun exercise to try and just remember that actor’s name from that one TV show all on my own. But the argument can absolutely be made that Google has actually made us smarter by giving us access to almost literally every bit of knowledge in the world. Surely that must count for something.

And of course, this is all at the detriment of our attention spans. Yep, I couldn’t avoid talking about it as much as I want to. It’s unfortunately just the truth- it’s not that we don’t need our attention spans anymore, it’s that algorithms are literally designed to keep your attention for as long as possible by tapping into that short-term reward part of your brain. ‘Ooh, a piece of candy’ scroll ‘Ooh, another piece of candy’ scroll. Except that’s happening faster than you can even process. Some of these algorithms have even been outed as using the same mechanics as drug addiction. Not having an attention span is definitely a side effect of all of this, and unfortunately only feeds into…

The death of the book.

Just kidding! You think I really believe books are going anywhere? No way. Not anytime soon. But reading in the traditional sense—what Price calls the idealist sense—is definitely taking a dive. And maybe that means it’s high time for it to. I’d love to be able to argue that we’re living in a very proletariat era with widespread access to knowledge, but the reality is that that access to knowledge is actually skewed by the companies that spread it. Google is chock-a-block with ads, and the companies at the very top of the results are major monopolies. It’s not just a search engine anymore; long gone are the days of Googling a hyper-specific question and finding niche forums at the top of the list (DuckDuckGo is really your guy if you want that-though those forums are usually pretty old and outdated now). Not to mention, you really need to know exactly what you’re looking for to use Google now. It used to function more like an encyclopedia, you search for ‘vampires’ and bingo, top result of azvampires.com and you’re reading about every kind of vampire mythology known to man. Now you have to search for ‘define vampire’, ‘vampire Wikipedia’, ‘what is a vampire’ to get anything of use. And I could spend more time than I already have talking about why Google’s algorithm appears to have changed so much, but my point is really this: it may seem as though this widespread access to information is a good thing, but our widespread access to information is painfully biased in favor of whatever it is that large corporations want you to think, and if you actually want to do any meaningful research on a topic with a wide variety of opinions, you’re best off Googling ‘vampire mythology books Reddit’, because the last major forum on the Internet will give you 20 opinions/suggestions for one question. So while the notion that Google is making us stupid is total baloney, what’s not baloney is that Google and the Internet as a whole cannot replace books. As much as I’d love to say I can find anything I want to learn on the Internet, there is SO much of my undergraduate degree that I would have never learned about on the Internet. Some knowledge is still gatekept… and that might be for the better given our current political climate.

Finally, I’ve reached my conclusion. I know, I’m quite long-winded. In its current state, the Internet simply cannot replace books. Rather, in its current state, the Internet shouldn’t replace books- but it is. And that’s scary.