This article was taken from the Wired 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Some moments transcend their immediate context to assume symbolic significance. One of these was provided by New York Police Department officers in November 2011, when they raided the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park and razed the tent library that had grown organically during the protest. More than 5,000 print volumes were thrown in the trash.
The event resonated loudly across social media. Beyond one's politics or sympathies, this gesture felt like a remix of
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's dystopian sci-fi novel of 1953, set in a future American society where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them.
It was a reminder of how books can provide dangerously beautiful bodies for ideas. Be they erudite tracts or trashy paperbacks, they spread their pages to whoever picks them up. Books make knowledge and culture promiscuous. And like sexy, subversive witches they have been burnt at the stake periodically throughout history.
The bodies of books is not just a metaphor. It is instructive that a natively digital movement such as Occupy, a movement inherently reflective of non-hierarchical network structures, that owes much of its viral spread to active use of online social channels, opted for old-school print as the format of choice for its libraries.
This is no fetishistic eulogy to the printed book. As we fast-track into an era of ebooks, there are both technological and cultural lessons in this example. It acts as a reminder that the printed book is both hardware and software, device and data, bound as one. As opposed to there being only the latter in digital format. It is body versus ghost. And physicality - leaving aside fire, flooding and feisty New York cops - is currently more resilient.
I write this as I look at a few floppy disks that sit silently on top of a pile of Pelican books from the 40s and 50s on my shelves. Speak to an archivist and they will probably estimate the life of any digital platform to be under ten years, while remarking on how hardware and software are continuously changing. And that's before they'd get on to the issues introduced by digital-rights management to the medium- and long-term longevity of any digital artefact.
Remember when, in 2009, Amazon remotely erased from the Kindles of its customers a couple of books to which it did not have the rights?
The whole affair read like a cheap and creepy literary joke, a pulp premonition of a potential future, especially when you consider that the books were George Orwell's1984 and Animal Farm.
And when, in 2010, Nicholas Negroponte predicted the demise of the printed book by 2015, we needed (and need) to be wary of welcoming such precipitous changes. Not due to some Luddite viewpoint, but because of being digital and recognising we're still very much shaping this new world of zeroes and ones. We've just started exploring its nuances and complexities.
We must be mindful of ebooks becoming like agricultural mono-cultures, capable of delivering increased yields in terms of accessibility, distribution and profits, but also open to diseases to which they have yet to build resistance. We need to remember that print can escape control and roam free.
Be it by tyrannical regimes, bully-boy businesses or the accelerated entropy inherent in the nature of digital, we need to be aware of these potential threats and ensure the bodies of books can continue to provoke, to cavort with our minds in years and generations to come.
Ashley Benigno is global director of creative expression at Nokia
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
