The Public Sphere of Starbucks

In high school and sometimes in undergrad, I used to go to Starbucks and other coffee houses to hang out with my friends. We would meet and spend all evening hanging out and talking. We'd even meet other customers and talk with them; it wasn't just a cup of coffee, it was an event. I can't remember the last time I did that. These days, if I make time to even go inside a Starbucks, or any coffee establishment, it's to grab a quick cup and get on my way. I still see the people settled in for a long evening, but most are typing on their laptops or studying/in deep conversation with 1 or 2 other people. What happened? Is it just my habits that have changed, or is it society as a whole?

According to Sociologist and author, Bryant Simon, Starbucks culture has changed or at least capitalized on change in the American culture. He contends that Starbucks has contributed to the death of the traditional public sphere found in places like coffee shops, public libraries, town halls, and church meetings. These used to be places where people could go to enjoy public discourse and debate, to discuss the goings on in the world with whoever would listen. Simon notes that in many instances "public spaces have become less available — and less desirable — since municipal resources are focused elsewhere." But what about Starbucks? They still provide a public place where people come to hang out and talk, but things like small tables, to-go cups, and especially Wi-Fi make spontaneous interaction less likely to occur. People are more likely to work on their own or talk only with the people that they came with. But is this a symptom of Starbucks culture or something bigger? To answer this question, we must first look at the history of the public sphere.

According to The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia essay by Jurgen Habermas, the public sphere is "a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body (p. 73)." The public sphere is theoretically a place where any member of a society can come and have a voice in determining public opinion on a matter. This is more than just voting in an election or poll, this is public discourse, where real conversation and debate takes place.

Newspapers immediately began to effect the public sphere as soon as they came into being. They were a way to disseminate information and opinion without physically gathering the public body of people. But then, "in the transition from literary journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media, the public sphere was transformed by the influx of private interests, which received special prominence in the mass media (Habermas, 76)." According to Habermas, the commercialization of the media, especially electronic media, changed communication and the "pureness" of the public sphere. With the invention of things like Public Relations, the line between news and advertisement became blurred. "Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs," adds Pieter Boeder. So, although in some ways the public sphere was growing, it was also distorting, and becoming a somewhat tainted place. However, what was happening in the media became a place to start conversations in more classic public arenas.

The real change happened with the introduction of the Internet. Suddenly, nearly instant communication across the world was possible, opening up the possibilities for a global public sphere. "Although news media increasingly transcend national borders," Boeder warns," this process does not automatically create a public sphere at a transnational or global level." Too many things, from political to language barriers stand in the way of a truly global public sphere. "Media globalization does not automatically entail the creation of a singular global public sphere, but rather a process of gradual blurring and differentiation of the public sphere to a multi-layered media structure, accompanied by an increase in interconnections (Boeder)."

One thing that we must keep in mind is that "the Internet is above all a decentralized communication system (Cyberdemocracy, Mark Poster, p.262)." As much as it brings the world together, it is not one big public forum where all users can meet and discuss public issues. Instead it is comprised of millions of individual sites and pages, where people with similar interests can (if they want to) discuss those interests. Even social networking sites that bring people together, like Facebook and Twitter, are only as public as the user makes them. One can not read and discuss every single tweet or status update or blog posting that occurs on the Internet. Not only are some set to "private," but it's just physically impossible. Instead, users have to select the posts that are interesting and relevant to them. Which begs the question, "If 'public' discourse exists as pixels and screens generated at remote locations by individuals one has never and probably will never meet, as it is in the case of the Internet with its 'virtual communities' and 'electronic cafes,' then how is it to be distinguished from 'private' letters, print face and so forth (Poster, p. 265)?" The line between public and private has now blurred, so that someone can be sitting in a public place with her laptop, having a discussion with friends all over the world, via the Internet.

With the prevalence of the Internet, "the alliance of the public sphere with a particular place or territory diminishes (Boeder)," in favor of virtual communities. So, just because public discourse is not happening as much between patrons of the same Starbucks, doesn't mean it's not happening on their laptops.

On Your Marx...

"Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone is really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men ." - Karl Marx, The German Ideology

What is language other than encoding one's consciousness then distributing it in the form or words, pictures, movements, etc. for someone to then decode. Hopefully they get some kind of accurate meaning from it. According to philosophers like Plato, the only way to achieve truth was through meaningful discourse (or as Marx calls it, "intercourse"). For them, the truth does not exist unless it is communicated. Although more modern philosophers like Stuart Hall believe that "reality exists outside of language," they also concede that "it is constantly mediated by and through language and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse (Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, p.166-167)." So, even if the truth or reality does in deed exist outside of language, it still has to be communicated effectively to have any meaning.

According to Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, "the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image (p.78)." The concept (signified) is invoked by the sound image (signifier). In order to communicate effectively with each other, two (or more) human beings must know the same signifier/signified "code." Without this basic concept, communication can be very hard if not impossible. "If no 'meaning' is taken, there can be no 'consumption (Hall, p.164)."

My father-in-law recently had his hearing checked, and apparently the doctor said that he has some frequency damage that makes it hard for him to hear the female voice. Assuming this is true, it is difficult for his ear to decode what is encoded in the female voice. However, some people might contend that most men have a hard time decoding anything that females encode and try to communicate with them. However, this may actually have to do with encoding and decoding different levels of a sign. "The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and associations, is the point where already coded signs intersect with deeply semantic codes of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions (Hall, 168)." For example, taking part of the Marx quote I used earlier, " intercourse with other men," out of context can be lead to quite a misunderstanding, because people can read into different (and wrong) connotative levels of that particular phrase.

According to Dictionary.com, the most dominant connotation (or definition) of the word intercourse is"dealings or communication between individuals, groups, countries, etc." The second most dominant connotation is "interchange of thoughts, feelings, etc." and finally the third (and least) dominant connotation is "sexual relations." This may no longer be accurate in everyday language, which is why "we say dominant, not 'determined', because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one 'mapping' (Hall, 169)."

The example above and others like it are constantly in the mind of the communicator. The 6:00 news and most local newspapers tend to make sure that they communicate in as straight forward a way as possible, making sure that the correct information gets out to the intended audience and that the right message gets across. "Broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they - the broadcasters - intended...that viewers are bit operating within the "dominant" or "preferred" code. Their ideal is "perfectly transparent communication" (Hall, 170). However, other some media intended for less broad, possibly more intelligent, audiences, like the NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me actually want the consumer to read the less dominant code, opting for a more tongue in cheek form of communication. The larger the audience's vocabulary and ability to decode the communicated material, the richer the potential for true, in-depth communication.

Marx believed that "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections (German Ideology, Ch. 1)." In his opinion, the more people an individual really communicated and identified with, the richer his pool of knowledge was. Although, I can't say that I agree with everything that Marx says, I do agree with this claim. The more real connections a person has in his environment, be it at home, at work, or in a community, the better off that person is. Feeling as though you are understood by someone is one of the best, most satisfying feelings in the world. Second only to someone completely understanding you and liking you anyway.

New Media: Databases Dressed to Impress

When I was about 11 years old, my dad bought my brother and me this really cool new game, Doom . Similar to Wolfenstein 3D, which we had been playing for about a year, we "were" the main character, seeing and doing everything from his perspective, exploring, killing bad guys, and getting to the next level. We had lots of fun playing that game for about a month, and got pretty good at it, until the gory, realistic graphics gave me nightmares, and we weren't allowed to play it anymore. Little did I know that 1993 was such a big year for the video game. Doom ended up being the granddaddy of the popularization of "first person" video games.


In Lev Manovich's 2001 book, The Language of New Media (which can be found in its entirety online), Doom and Myst (which also came out in 1993) are used as examples of "how computer games use — and extend — cinematic language (91)." Doom and Myst both used "cinematics" to create mood and realistic feel for the worlds they were depicting. Manovich argues that New Media as a whole borrows most of what it is from pieces of traditional media, especially cinema. Doom and Myst for example have opening credits and back stories. The player gets to be the main character, acting out the rest of the story to achieve the goal.

In fact, Manovich contends that a lot of what people see as differentiators between new and traditional media actually existed before new media. For example, multimedia display (which Bolter and Grusen would call Hypermediation) is not a unique hallmark of new media, because "sound and text (be it intertitles of the silent era or the title sequences of the later period) [has been around] for a whole century. Cinema thus was the original modern 'multimedia'(67)." He also refutes the idea that in contrast to traditional media where the order of presentation was fixed, the user can now interact with a media object, by evoking "ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art and other representational 'shortcuts' required the user to fill-in the missing information (71)."

So what is new media? For one thing, Manovich argues that most new media objects are at the heart, databases. They store information to be accessed by the user. Whether the new media is in the form of a website, video game, or a mobile phone OS, new media devices

appear as a collections of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. The user experience of such computerized collections is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site (194).

This is especially true for the web, which, no matter what the packaging of the website, it is in the end a way of displaying a collection of data. Social Media sites are collections of profiles and status updates for the user to access and interact with. News sites are again, databases of stories to search and read. Even gaming websites are collections of data for the user to interact with, but they exemplify better Manovich's other attribute of new media: the algorithm.

Most computer games have at least some kind of narrative or goal, which the player strives to achieve. In order to attain that goal, the player must figure out and perform the game's algorithm. For example, "when a new block appears, rotate it in such a way so it will complete the top layer of blocks on the bottom of the screen making this layer disappear (197)," is the algorithm for Tetris. Narratives, one of the results of algorithms in new media, are in some ways the opposites of databases. However, I submit that narratives need databases in order to exist. Even if the data is in a specific order to be given out in a specific way, it is still needed. And the algorithm is what holds the two together.

"In Doom and Myst — and in a great many other computer games — narrative and time itself are equated with the movement through 3D space, the progression through rooms, levels, or words (215)." This story-telling through interacting with visuals in "space" instead of only seeing or reading about them is a key element of new media. Manovich likes to talk about video games, but computer Operating Systems are also prime examples of this feature. Computer desktops contain icons that, when clicked, take the user to organized folders, documents, programs, or the Internet. All are laid out in space the way the user arranges them. Websites are also often navigable spaces meant to be explored, for example JK Rowling's Official Website. Although, like most websites it is at heart a database of news and information about the author, it is set up as her office, to be explored and interacted with to get the full experience.

So, according to Manovich, what really sets new media apart from old media is its computer-ness. Although it reflected cinema in its look and its story-telling and books and board games in its interactivity, Doom, as scary and "realistic" as it was, required a computer to be created and to function. It was after all, just a database dressed to impress.

Leave My Aura Alone!

The veritable wealth of information on which to write for this week's readings was overwhelming. The text I highlighted in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Bill Nichol's "The Work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems" more than doubled the allowable word count for our entries. With that in mind, I had real difficulty trying to decide what to focus on for this week's blog. I must admit that when Professor David Parry mentioned Benjamin's focus on aura in art work, I imagined Phoebe from Friends trying to cleanse Ross's aura. But that is not really the aura Benjamin is talking about.

Benjamin's concept of aura has to do with the authenticity of an item, namely a piece of art. Benjamin defines authenticity as, "the essence of all this is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to is testimony to the history which it has experienced (Benjamin 221)." Meaning that the aura of a piece of art is not only is presence, but its cultural significance and history.

An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, aura (Benjamin 223).

For Benjamin, the presence of the aura of an original piece of art was very important, and the prevalence of not only the reproduction of art, but art created to be reproduced, greatly concerned him. He was chiefly concerned with photographs and film, which were created to be reproduced. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense (Benjamin 224).

Film, which is created specifically in pieces, for the camera, to be edited together and projected for an audience later, especially concerned Benjamin. His greatest concern being for the film actor , because “the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance, to the audience in person. (Benjamin 228).” The actor, then is performing for the camera and not for any live audience, only for the idea of the audience who may one day view the edited and projected piece. Benjamin believed that since the actor got his aura from acting for the audience, then the film actors aura is depleted because not only is the audience not present for the original performance but there is no full performance of the original piece. Because of this, he believed that film as an art has a diminished aura. However, he contends that

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity (Benjamin 231).

People’s fascination with movie stars, Benjamin believes, is a reaction to the lack of a real aura surrounding the art. He does, however, concede (in a footnote) that film making “not only permits in the most direct way but virtually causes mass distribution. It enforces distribution because the production of a film is so expensive that an individual who for instance might afford to but a painting no longer can afford to buy a film (Benjamin 244).”

Benjamin, who died trying to escape the Nazis in World War II, did not live long enough to see the invention of the computer. If he had, his idea of aura would have been turned on its head. Bill Nichols attempted to build upon Benjamin’s ideas and expand them for the age of cybernetics.

Nichols contended that “If mechanical reproduction centers (sic) on the question of reproducibility and renders authenticity and the original problematic, cybernetic simulation renders experience, and the real itself, problematic (Nichols 30).” By the 1980s the computer has superseded film and television as the new, state of the art form of expression. Not only did it not have an aura in the way that Benjamin viewed it, but computers along with other scientific advances were pushing the boundaries between art and artificial intelligence.

At this point, for Nichols, “The question of whether film or photography is an art is here secondary to the question of whether art itself has not been radically transformed in form and function (Nichols 24).” The integration of function into art in our daily lives has become so prolific, that in many cases it is hard to tell the difference. Is my iPhone a piece of art? What about my GPS or my video editing system?

The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its meaning - without history, without depth, without aura, affect or feeling. The copy reproduces the world, the chip simulates it (Nichols 33).

The Bruce Willis movie, “Surrogates,” in which people can replace themselves with life-like remote-controlled robots, came out this weekend. In the movie, it was hard to know if you were interacting with the real person or the robot simulating and being controlled by that person. Although an AI movie itself is not news, the fact that CNN is reporting that this idea may not be so far-fetched after all is food for thought. If in the near future, life-like robots interact with humans on a daily basis, whose aura is Phoebe going to cleanse? Ross’s or Robot Ross’s? And would she be able to tell the difference?

How Google Books Nearly Saved my Life

Finding this week's book was slightly difficult for me. I made the mistake of not immediately going to the bookstore or Amazon to get my books at the beginning of the semester, so now I have the challenge of finding them the week they are due. This week was particularly challenging since the only copy at the UT Dallas Library was checked out, the local book stores were also sold out. I eventually found it at the Downtown Dallas Library (yes, I did grace the halls of a library after all) but not before, I found it on line! Almost the whole text of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe can be found on Google Books! Since I did in fact need at least the whole text of the first half, I did continue looking until I found a hard copy. But the point is, I found it and thousands of other books online, free to anyone who has access to the Internet. In fact, Google now lets you custom print millions of books at home for free, or for a small sum, you can have your very own copy of an out of print book printed and bound for you.

The magnitude of printing press's impact on dissemination of information, allowing many more people access to books and information than ever before, is only approached by the Internet. Before the invention of the printing press, books were written and copied, but just one book took lots of time and money to create. If someone wanted more than one copy, they either had to hire several scribes, or wait for the same scribe to copy the original (or the copy) again AND it was pretty much guaranteed that the two copies would not be identical. For example:

In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins for quinterno for setting up and printing Ficino's translation of Plato's Dialogues. A script might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one (16).

Each of those 1,025 copies were identical and could be sold for less, while still making a profit. This meant that more, many more people had access to books. This not only changed the possibilities of learning, learning by reading instead of only by a live instructor, but also the possibilities of writing, mass communication, organization, and record keeping. The Internet has taken these possibilities even further. Not only can people access and read books and other information on the web, but also take classes remotely, publish their own works on blogs and other websites, as well as organize and disseminate endless amount of information.

Books were not the only media that were revolutionized by the printing press. Although movable type and block letters had been around for centuries, the printing press made maps, icons, and charts easier to replicate and mass produce. The result being that more people had access, recognized inaccuracies and created new, better maps and charts. Although easily reusable wood blocks meant that the same picture could be used on one page to illustrate Verona and in another Mantua (59), they could also be used to recreate accurate, recognizable pictures of the kings. In the same way, the Internet has made it far easier to look up pictures of celebrities and get instant updates on statistics and information. The consequence being that with the Internet, as well as the early printing press, not everything is looked over and fact checked right away. However, also like the Internet, the freely offered collective knowledge of readers often led to quickly reprinted new "more accurate" editions of books.

Then, like now the question of intellectual property began to arise. Before the invention of the printing press, there were no authors or copyrights. Stories were written in books and then copied by a scribe then memorized by a wandering scholar or minstrel and credited to anonymous if credited at all.

The terms plagiarism and copyright did not exist for the minstrel. It was only after printing that they began to hold significance for the author (84).

Now, with the easy access to copying and publishing that the Internet provides, the issues of creative property have returned once again. The free books that can be accessed on Google Books are supposed to be out from under copyright rules and considered Public Domain, however, not all of the books that they have offered up that way have been so. Fan Fiction sites have also brought up the question of who owns the rights to made up worlds and characters. Or even, the simple act of reposting a story form a news site can be considered piracy if the original story is not properly credited or liked back to.

Comparing the printing press revolution and the Internet revolution could be a book (or website) of its own. The question is, is the Internet really as big, as life changing, no, world changing as the invention of the printing press? I'm sure we'll be able to print a copy of that book soon.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Reading this week's book, Remediation, was a little bit more difficult than the previous readings. It caused what I like to call "brain fuzz," where you get to the end of a paragraph and think, "wait, what did I just read?" I think this is partly because Bolter and Grusen have a nasty habit of making up words which they do not explain, and then proceed to use them juxtaposed against one another in sometimes ambiguous ways. At least the difficult words in the other readings could be looked up in the dictionary.

This being by far the most current of our readings, having been written not only in a time when I was alive, but also cognizant of and actually using the technology described in the book as it was being written, I was a little surprised to not know or understand a lot of the references. The movie Strange Days and the music video, Telecommunications Breakdown were used ad-nausium throughout the book, but I have never heard of either of them. And I'll be honest, I had NO idea what a MUD was, and the context clues were about as clear as mud. Multiuser Dungeon? Really? So, it's basically World of Warcraft meets chat room. (Do they even have chat rooms anymore?) Well, I guess as much as things change they stay the same. So, after discovering that this book was a weird kind of time capsule, I decided to look past the dated material and look at the content.

Bolter and Grusen argue that media continues to grow upon itself as it evolves from one medium to another. It takes part of that old medium and "remediates" it, or uses the old thing in a new way, to show how the new technology improved on the old. One way in which they contend media tries to improve on itself is the ever present, ever unattainable quest for immediacy, or reality to be captured and experienced through media. For example, a photograph is a more realistic version of a painting, and a movie (short for "moving picture") is a more realistic version of a picture, and a "talkie" is a more realistic version of a movie, and so on. Each medium builds upon the last to fulfill the previous medium's broken promises of realism. This is reminiscent of McLuhan's rear view mirror theory, in which we can only understand our current media in terms of past media. Bolter and Grusen take it one step further in contending that new media IS old media, with a face lift (which, by the way, they contend is a remediation of the self).

They also contend that media is both trying to be immediate (feel so real that it disappears) and hypermediate (to constantly remind the viewer or hearer of itself). One of my favorite types of media is the theme park, and not just any theme park, Walt Disney World! Walking down Main Street USA, one is submerged in the sights and sounds of Disney's "make believe" world. In this sense the theme park is very much immediate, it reaches every one of your senses and brings you in to its fantasy. Even the lines bring you into the story of a Mission to Mars or a journey back to time. However, a quick trip inside for some air will jolt the vacationer back to reality as he is bombarded with food and souvenirs for sale, at quite a hefty price tag. Or, when walking from one "land" to another, the park guest hears a change in music, costume, and architecture and is again reminded of the media surrounding him. The whole park is full of remediation everywhere one looks. At the end of every ride is a gift shop with souvenirs for that ride. Chances are that the ride was based on a Disney movie, which was probably based on a book. The park itself is a remeidation of Disneyland, which was remediation of the TV show Disneyland, which then again, was a remediation of the theme park Disneyland. Disney doesn't call it remediation though, they call it Synergy.

This back and forth remediation is also seen in television and the web, mostly by TV stations that now have websites. In a world where information is free and immediate, channels like CNN use their website to not only send viewers back to the TV station, but also use the TV station to send viewers back to the website. Both mediums are full of hypermediated material with multiple boxes of scrolling information and pictures, each is a veritable wealth of information and stimulation. I believe CNBC is the station responsible for the "octobox" and the "decabox" showing 8 or even 10 "live" people at once talking with each other about the day's news. Although it is in some ways immediate, because the people are "live" and talking to each other in real time, it is also extremely hypermediated with not only the sheer quantity of talking heads, but also the graphics and music along with them, one can not help but remember that she is watching TV.

Although technology (especially the web) has moved forward by leaps and bounds in the last ten years since Remediation was written, its examples can still be seen in the new (and let's face it, remediated) generations of technology available today.

Oral Culture and Your Local Library

I joined my local branch of the Dallas Library last November so I could get my hands on some information about my new dog. After two trips I called it quits. They did not have much useful information, the hours were inconvenient, and I could find everything I needed online. Without late fess. 24 hours a day. I am not the only one fed up with traditional libraries, most of the people I know have not stepped into a library in years. Why would they, when a world of information is right at their fingertips through the world wide web?

Is the library going to be another casualty of the digital age, falling to the way side like so many newspapers and record stores before it? The answer, of course, is yes. Or maybe no. According to John D. Sutter's CNN article, libraries may have a future, with or without books. Like any other piece of technology, the written word has to change with the times or it becomes obsolete. As a source for knowledge and free information, the Library as we know it is likely to soon become extinct. However, some are changing with the times.

Librarians realize that the "one way flow of information from book to patron isn't good enough anymore. (Sutter)." The same frustration with the unchanging nature of books is expressed in Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" when he says,

"a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get nothing back, except the same, often stupid words which called for your question in the first place (79)."

According to Sutter, many forward-thinking libraries are solving this problem by beginning to blog and tweet about what is going on in their neighborhoods as well as offer digital, non-book services like video, gaming, and music labs. This is just they type of change that Marshall McLuhan called for in his 1969 Playboy interview. Forty years ago, he saw the change coming when he said,

"Book learning is no longer sufficient in any subject; the children all say now, 'Let's talk Spanish,' or 'Let the Bard be heard,' reflecting their rejection of the old sterile system where education begins and ends in a book."

By meeting these needs though turning themselves into community gathering centers where people can debate ideas and making stories come alive by acting them out and recording them, modernized libraries are in some ways returning to oral culture roots.

But, are the values of oral or preliterate culture better than bookish, literate culture? In preliterate, oral culture, events were remembered and agreed upon through collective consciousness and "customary law, trimmed of material no longer in use, was automatically always up to date and thus youthful (Ong, 98)." They did not consult a written, unchanging book, they consulted each other. These days, some people would say that we remember too much through the printed word. With the removal of the physical book, a more interactive society can happen. Although the traditional function of a library may be challenged, the digital age may be able to use new media to "retribalize" society. Theorists like McLuhan believed that “Print centralizes socially and fragments physically, whereas electronic media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man (Playboy).” He believed that electronic media could bring the world together in a similar way that printed media had torn it apart. However, in some ways, printed media has brought the world together for thousands of years, allowing them to communicate with each other, even if they do not speak the same “mother tongue,” though Learned Latin.

According to Ong, “Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got underway with greater difficulty, if it had gotten under way at all. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Isaac Newton commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin (114).” So without Learned (written) Latin, the world might very well still be in the dark ages, scientifically, and much more segregated socially. The thinkers of the world were able to consult the same texts to convey and discover information in a way that was not possible though other spoken or written word. Through new media, this type of communication without boundaries is once again available, but on a much larger scale.

Although some level of affluency is needed to own new technology, access to it is free and becoming much more available through forward thinking libraries. So, if you walk into your local library branch in the next few years and see that although it lacks books, it’s got a great interactive media lab, and discussion forum, don’t be surprised. Just summon your inner tribes man and join in.

And tweet me. Maybe then I’ll give the library a chance again. If it’s open.