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Words: They're not dead yet"Technology is killing the printed word." As triumphal cry or doleful complaint, this remarkable claim has been gaining strength for a third of a century. The public first heard it from Marshall McLuhan as he passionately embraced new media technologies and prophesied the end of The Gutenberg Galaxy in the 1960s. It returned in the 1980s with literary theorist Neil Postman, whose Amusing Ourselves to Death lamented that a modern culture of image-based entertainment had erased the typographic mind of an earlier era. But while both McLuhan and Postman centred their thoughts on the television, the 1990s is setting the book more and more in rivalry to the newer technologies of the CD ROM and the Web. Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies gently but determinedly warns that ``the stable hierarchies of the printed page ... are being superseded by the rush of impluses through freshly minted circuits''. Meanwhile a new generation of technological triumphalists form themselves into fervent groupings like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to echo Stuart Brand's revolutionary declaration that information wants to be free. For good or ill, the 1990s are filled with visions of computers and hypertexts laying waste to the old world of paper and linear narrative. The pessimists and the optimists in this textual tangle both seize on the same metaphor: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, which so transformed Western Europe from a place of Catholic verities to the centre of an increasingly world-wide individualistic, knowledge-based and technological culture. In the 1990s, they believe, a shift of similar proportions is beginning. The entire culture will be turned upside down. And listening to all these increasingly loud pronouncements are ordinary "information consumers", for want of a better term, wondering whether the Web will rot their brain or whether picking up the newspaper every morning will mark them as irredeemable Luddites. The Future of the BookEnter The Future of the Book, a 306-page compendium of essays from University of California Press. Edited by Stanford University Professor of Linguisitcs Geoffrey Nunberg, it brings philosophers, psychologists, historians and other theorists together in an exotic but palatable stew of analysis - all tied together by the celebrity semiotician Umberto Eco. The Future of the Book teases out at least three separate strands of debate about the future of our information. One is over the possibility that screen print will replace the codex book - in its finest incarnation leather-bound and filled with thick, rich paper pages. A second argument rages over hypertext, and its power to replace the linear form of the book with clickable links and a spaghetti-bowl of ideas to be explored in any of a thousand ways. And a third strand of debate seeks to decide whether images can or should replace words as the dominant means of transmitting ideas. The debate between paper and screen is, as Nunberg himself points out, a battle of fetishisms. Lovers of the traditional book, he notes, tend to harp on the difficulty of curling up with a computer in bed and scorn the thought of screen-reading. "Nobody", the novelist E. Annie Proulx is quoted as declaring, "is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever." Meanwhile, the Webmasters stroke their mini-towers, upgrade their browser software every fortnight and examine the pixelated pages of c›net for the latest reviews. Truth is, the billions of dollars being pored into screen research will soon bring the twitchy little screen a good deal closer to the book. But as Nunberg, Eco and Paul Duguid all note in separate essays, TV is not that far from the movies - and film is flourishing. Hard not to think that page and screen will not find a similar compromise. Hypertext confronts the power of the storyThe power of hypertext introduces a more serious question. As Paul Duguid points out in one of the best essays in The Future of the Book, hypertext has been around a long time. (You're reading a hypertext document of sorts now, a newspaper which prompts you to flick from here to there from somewhere else.) The linear narrative, however, deserves to be taken seriously, if only because have kept buying it, in everything from The Bible to The Bridges of Madison County. Disjointed, non-linear films surfaced aplenty in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was mostly this-then-this stories, from All the President's Men to Star Wars, that really packed the cinemas. None of the hypertext enthusiasts in The Future of the Book really get to grips with the power of the simple story. Luca Toschi thinks of replacing the authors a single narrative with many. George Landow more dramatically talks of liberating readers from "the tyrannical, univocal voice of the novel". No-one, though, quite gets to grips with Sven Birkert's strongest point from The Gutenberg Elegies; until now, temporary domination by someone else's thoughts has been the very point of reading and writing. Will one picture replace a thousand wordsBut it's the debate over the rise of the image that proves the most fascinating battle in The Future of the Book. Many of the book's contributors believe picture is overcoming text, and most are uneasy about it - no great surprise, since they are all so used to writing. Most Web authors, notes Jay David Bolter, feel the need to put images on their pages; he fears the word will struggle for space. George Landow, having embraced the technologies beyond the book, nevertheless closes by wondering what will happen to children's thinking when they can drop videos into school projects so easily that "they lose the ability to formulate abstract or physical descriptions". Leave it to Umberto Eco, though, to find a less gloomy answer. He does not fear images; indeed, he notes that television has taught his children more about foreign lands than he learnt as a child reading adventure novels. But when he looks at the Web, he sees all its uncounted billions of words, and declares that the new generation will be alphabetic- and not image-oriented. Rising bandwidth may yet prove Eco wrong. But he provides a useful reminder that far from destroying Gutenberg's world, the technologies of the 1990s are taking us more deeply into it.
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