This Will Kill That

From Nicholas Dames at n+1…

“Ceci tuera cela”: the famous slogan of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, as he touches a printed book and glances nostalgically at the cathedral towers.  “This will kill that.”  It’s not hard to sympathize these days.  Hugo had to reimagine the 15th century in order to evoke a major shift in technologies of the word.  We just have to hold our smart phones while looking at a copy of Hugo’s novel—or read Hugo’s novel on our smart phones. Resistance is futile: welcome to our new digital overlords!

But Hugo’s resigned pessimism as well as his technological determinism, are, I think, unwarranted now, for reasons both abstract and pragmatic.  The abstract reason is that technological changes to literacy have slow and unpredictable effects.  Right now many digital formats are still straightforward recreations of the book; the Kindle and its cousins reproduce a mise en page that hasn’t changed in fundamentals since 13th century scribes at the new universities of Western Europe offered harried students books with running heads, chapter titles, indices, and the like.  What remains to be seen is if, and how, digital technology changes that format at all. More…