Old media, sensual pleasures, resistance, future, …

Just as the arrival of photography did not put an end to the art of painting and television did not disperse film enthusiasts, in both “Paper or Me, You Know…” and “The Book to Come,” Derrida firmly states that despite the advancements of digital technologies, the death of the book in nowhere near and physical text is not disappearing soon. However, digitalization of the book will cause social, political, cultural and historical transformations, and from what we learn through the writings of Derrida, Nunberg, Landow, and Eco, the adoption of new media is an evolutionary process and not a revolutionary one.

Against all speculations, photography never replaced painting, but the fear of its detailed visual representation capabilities, forcefully encouraged artists to move away from Realism and into subjective representation techniques, such as Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, etc.. The radical shift from accurate recreation of the subject to experimenting with texture, color, and surface (although not well received by the public), was a significant moment in the history of painting and eventually influenced literature, philosophy, and art. Years later, in the 1940’s , proliferation of television sets forced movie studios to rethink film production strategies, and more importantly changed the political economy of movie industry by decreasing Hollywood’s global dominance. Comparably, the same type of resistance faced the digital text. In “Twenty Minutes into the Future,” Landow recounts Edward Tufte’s inadequate argument against digital text when, at “beyond Gutenburg” conference, Tufte reminded the audience that computer screen is incapable of conveying the sensual pleasures that book objects carry. The above examples demonstrate that, with the introduction of any new medium, there comes resistance and anxiety of withdrawal and reduction, and fear of losing the sense of self. Derrida considers nostalgia and the desire for the object (paper), as main causes for this unease.

Both George Landow and Derrida repeatedly state that although digitized text separates textuality form the physical form, it improves adaptability, duplicability, transportation, and efficiency, and above all, it saves the planet earth’s resources. In addition, just as photography had a dramatic effect on the economy of painting by offering the technology of reproduction, the shift from analog to digital text will change the economy of information. Interestingly, while Landow is very optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of digital text, Derrida, on the other hand, seems skeptical about the globalization and the flow of information through computer networking, and fears the lack of self-protection, and the new definitions of private/public.