Deanna Markum: Good evening.
I'm Deanna Markum, the Associate Librarian for Library Services,
and on behalf of James Billington, the Librarian of Congress,
I welcome all of you do this fifth symposium in our series,
"Managing Knowledge and Creativity in the Digital Context."
We've had a number of very interesting speakers
over the last several weeks, and all of our speakers have asked us
to imagine a world in which digital information predominates.
We've had a combination of philosophy, technology,
and a little bit of management thrown in on the side
in our discussions, and tonight, we continue that tradition
with Dr. David Levy, who is a professor of The School
of Information at the University of Washington.
We'll have two responders tonight;
the first will be Glenn Hauptmann [spelled phonetically],
who is next to Dr. Levy, who is the Publisher and President
of "The Light Beam Group," and we have Prosser Gifford,
who is the Director of the Kluge Center,
here at the Library of Congress.
At the end of the program, we'll take questions from the audience,
and we'll take questions from our viewers, of the C-SPAN broadcast,
so we ask you, if you're watching the C-SPAN broadcast to please think
about the questions you would like to ask any of our speakers,
and we'll try to answer those tonight,
either by one of the speakers or responders, or we will try
to get back to you with an E-mail response.
At this time, I'm very pleased to introduce tonight my colleague
of this series, Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, who is the holder
of the Papamarkou Chair in the Kluge Center,
and he will introduce tonight's Speaker.
Derrick. Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: Thank you Deanna.

When I was given the honor of receiving the Chair,
the Papamarkou Chair, which is defined as technology in education,
I met the Librarian at the Library of Congress, James Billington,
and he gave me mission, and he said, "You should really try
to further this understanding of the digital culture,
but you should also try and help to reconcile, within the library,
the people of the book, and the people of the screen."
In other words, he said, and he described the situation
as being very -- not a division or any kind of hostility,
but a very strong favor for either the reading on paper,
or reading on the screen, or at least dealing
with the information coming from the whole electronic environment.
So that when I was looking, with Deanna Markum,
for the potential guests in the series,
finally she suggested David Levy immediately,
and Prosser Gifford lent me his book immediately,
and it couldn't be a better choice for that particular theme
of reconciling the people of the book and the people
of the screen, and you'll see why.
David Levy actually began as a computer scientist,
and got his Ph.D. in computer science, then dropped it.
I mean, he finished it, but got out of there,
and dropped the whole thing, and he became a calligrapher.
His whole entourage could not understand how anybody,
who can cost half a million to the state just to produce, A,
a computer scientist, because that's what it costs,
and the work that it takes in order to become that way,
could abandon such a produce a career,
and go and do some totally bizarre thing like calligraphy.
Well, it turns out, that he also got a degree in calligraphy from London,
and when he came back, he was grabbed by Xerox Park to become one
of their advisor in, guess what, writing on screen.
So he knows everything.
He was actually really down to the last detail of the history of how
to make, you know, something, how to make a font, how to make a design,
and ended up also being able
to be doing this extraordinary work at Xerox Park.
He published a book, which is there on the table, Scrolling Forward,
and I forced his hand because I wanted to make sure
that theme did appear in this series, so that he's going to talk
to us about many more things, and what happens when you go from page
to screen, and if he doesn't, I'll ask him questions.
David Levy.
David Levy: Thank you, Derrick, and thanks to Deanna, both of you,
for that lovely introduction.
I really appreciate -- I am really delighted and honored to be here
to speak to you, to be at the Library of Congress,
and to actually, to talk about a subject,
the subject of this whole series, which is of such great importance
and interest to so many of us, that is our digital future,
our collective digital future.
The place I want to start is by calling to mind an advertisement
that I saw in The New York Times Magazine a couple of years ago.
It was an ad for the IBM ThinkPad laptop,
which happens to be the very kind of laptop that I myself have right now,
and of course, it showed somebody sitting, with a laptop on his lap,
but that isn't what caught my attention.
What caught my attention was where this person was sitting.
This person was sitting in the stacks of a library,
and I can't show you right now the actual IBM ad,
but I have reconstructed it with me playing the part of the guy
with a laptop, and this is very much what the actual advertisement
looked like.
It showed a person, surrounded by books, and in the stacks,
and it seemed to me, as soon as I saw this ad,
it was a double-page spread in The New York Times Magazine.
I thought, this is so perfect for introducing the subject that we are
so interested and concerned about, which is, what is the relationship
between the old technologies, the old media,
and the new technologies and the new-media?
What does it all mean?
What does it mean for the value and significance of our lives; not just,
what does it mean in terms of the literal bits and bytes?
And that's what I want to talk about during the next about half hour.
Roger Chartier, the eminent French historian of the book,
has observed that, after the invention of the printing press,
it took, "An immense effort, motivated by anxiety
to put the world of the written word in order."
And I think this phrase and this point is a useful jumping off point
for two important observations about our digital future.
The first is that the printed book, the book that has been so central
for five centuries approximately, has been so central in education,
learning, scholarship, and entertainment, the modern book,
it didn't come into existence overnight.
In fact, it took, as Chartier points out, hundreds of years for technical
and social innovation to develop around the codex, the form of folded
and bound pages, to create the modern world of book culture.
And as you can see on this slide, I've just illustrated some
of the socio and technical developments that took centuries
to develop: the modern notion of publishing, modern libraries;
new genres arose out of the printed book like the novel, the newspaper,
journals; the notion of the modern author, the person who writes
and owns the products of his or her labors; notions of work in edition;
modern notions of catalogs and finding aids and bibliographies;
and finally, a topic that will be discussed in this series,
I think in a few weeks, the modern notion of copyright,
a system of regulating the ownership and distribution
of this printed artifact.
So what I'm suggesting, and what I think Chartier is really staying
in that very simple quote, is that the book that we now care
about is really not the physical artifact alone.
It's this entire ecology or infrastructure of artifacts
and technologies and institutions and practices.
So that's the first point.
The second point, which I think is really implicit
in that little remark of Chartier's, is that we are entering, surely,
a new period, a new immense effort, motivated partly by anxiety,
and of course, by excitement as well.
It is a time when we all know only too well,
digital technologies are coming into, and they are rippling
through the entire ecosystem or ecology that the infrastructure,
that was built to produce print culture and the printed book.
And so it's hardly an accident that if you look around at the categories
that are on the outside of this slide, basically every single one
of these notions, over the last five to ten years, has been questioned,
and is being challenged in some way or other,
because it's the entire ecosystem that is shaking,
not just the artifact alone: Questions about, what does it mean
to publish, when people can put things on the Web?
Questions about what the future of selling looks,
and what happens to libraries.
Questions about whether novels will continue,
or whether there is something beyond newspapers.
A lot of work, a lot of concern about what happens
to the scholarly journal now.
There have been questions about whether authorship is going
to go away in the digital age; about whether we need catalogs,
given that we've got Google and other finding aids, and finally,
we also have major questions now about the nature of copyright
in the digital age, and whether or not copyright will turn
out to be an adequate foundation for regulating the distribution
of Web pages and other such things.
So those are my initial two points that come
out have Chartier's remark.
The first is, we're really talking about a vast system,
ecology of practices, all of which are part of the shake up as we move
in an uncertain way from page to screen.

So what I want to do next is I want to take you through some
of the observations that I think we can make about some of the trends
that are actually happening now.
We've had enough experience, collectively, with the digital world
that I think some trends are starting to become clear.
If you think about it, the Web has been out there
on Main Street for about a decade.
The personal computer has been available for two decades,
for about 20 years, and E-mail has actually been around,
if you go right back to academic uses and early corporate uses;
E-mail has been around for at least 30 years.
So we actually have the basis, I think,
for beginning to see some trends, and some developments,
and the way I'm going to -- what I want to focus on is I want to talk,
in succession, about some of the things that I see happening
to books, then some things I see happening to the nature of reading,
and finally, something about where we are with regard to libraries.

So when we talk about the book, when we talk about the codex,
this set of folded and often bound pages, it's clear that when we look
around the world, when we looked out at the world today,
we see the codex being used in many different forms.
We see it in the notebook, which is still very alive.
We see it in the address book.
We see it in the phone book, the scrapbook, and we also see it
in the newspaper, which although it isn't literally bound,
is still basically the form of a codex.
Of course, nobody has been worrying about the future
of the phone book, right?
Nobody has really cared enough to a claim that or to care really,
that the phone book is dead.
It's one other form of the codex, the bound and printed book,
the centerpiece of print culture
that people have been so worried about.
But it's interesting to notice that in the last,
I think approximately five years, we haven't seen a whole lot
of declaration about the death of the book.
That phase of our digital evolution seems to be over,
and I think more people, including technologists,
are coming to recognize the value of the book and its place
in the larger ecosystem that is still evolving.
I think, in the last ten years, we've seen two significant failures
of rhetoric and technology,
with regard to this idea that the book is dead.
The first one, which begins in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s,
is this view that the next form of the narrative
that would replace the novel would be hypertext fiction,
and certain early hypertext fiction authors like Michael Joyce
and Stuart Moulthrop and others wanted to claim,
in the way that all avante guard movements want to claim
that they were the future, and that the future of reading would not be,
and reading narrative would not be reading a simple linear sequence,
but it would be the reader making choices, among different points,
and therefore, in effect, writing his or her own narrative.
I think it was clear though, by about the end of the '90s,
by about 2000, that although the experiments
in hypertext fiction were fascinating,
that they never got a very large readership.
And people, such as Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop have,
in effect, agreed that that particular experiment
in narrative is not going to achieve the success
that they first hoped it would.
The second interesting experiment that I think has tempered our view
about the future of the book is, of course, what's happened
over the last five to seven years, with regard to e-books.
This is the idea that specialized hardware
and software would give people much greater benefit for reading novels
and memos and newspapers and magazines online,
and that has noticeably not transpired.
So these are two cases where claims for the death
of the book simply haven't materialized.
I want to be really clear though, that I'm not suggesting
that we will not see vital new forms of say, digital literature,
of literature in digital form, or the possibility
of serious, electronic books.
On the contrary, I think we will see fascinating
and important developments happening.
All I'm suggesting is that these early experiments,
not only that they failed in some sense, in an interesting way,
not a way to be knocked, but rather, that the claims
that people were making for them were clearly over the top
about the death of the book.
In fact, there is, I think, by now, a growing understanding,
not only among scholars, but the rest of us that,
in the case of older technologies and media, that very often,
these are not simply replaced when something new
and better comes along, but they are displaced.
They change their role and function in the larger ecology or ecosystem.
So if you look at the scroll, for example, the roll or the scroll,
it has a very active and important life in Jewish culture,
in Jewish learning, study, and worship, and in fact, the scroll,
which is, you could say is a pass technology of 2000 years ago,
is very much alive in this particular ecological niche.
What's more, it's being used in conjunction with the book.
The two of them actually work together in a kind
of hybrid or heterogeneous way.   And I would want to suggest to you

that that's actually what we're seeing with regard to the book
and the screen, or the page and the screen as well.
In my book, Scrolling Forward.
I devoted a chapter to looking at Leaves of Grass,
looking at my childhood copy of Leaves of Grass,
which I love dearly, at the significance and the importance
of that physical artifact for me, but also looking
at how useful it has been and still is to have the physical artifact,
and also to have the tremendous resources of different versions
of Leaves of Grass on the Web.
The point that I'm wanting to make, that I'm wanting to leave you
with regarding this is that it's really, today, as in the past,
and I believe in the future, it's a heterogeneous world of technologies,
of devices and artifacts, and that's what I really wanted to say.
It's movement and the shifting of this ecology
that we need to be studying.   And here, let's talk about how

that ecology is shifting, with regard to reading.
By the way, this image is a ceramic sculpture that's been
in my parent's apartment for many years.
So I'm very familiar with it,
and I use it to illustrate the sense we have of reading as this deep,
reading and study as a kind of deep and significant activity,
which is something I'm going to come back
to come toward the end of my talk.
I want to point out a couple of trends
that I think are becoming clear about the nature of reading.
The first one is that it's now clear, it's become clear,
especially in the last five years, that the balance between reading
on screens and reading on paper is really shifting.
Five years ago very few people were reading things
of any length on the screen.
They were printing out their E-mail, but that's now really changing,
and there are various studies, notably,
most notably a former colleague of mine,
Kathy Marshall [spelled phonetically],
who works at Microsoft, is doing some very interesting studies
of how people use paper and digital forms, and one of the things
that is becoming clear is that more and more people,
more than 50 percent in one of her studies, more and more people are
at least reading entire, full-length articles from The New York Times
and other places online, and I might add too,
that Kathy has a very interesting essay called, "Reading
and Interactivity in the Digital Library," which will be appearing
in a book that the Deanna Markum is editing,
which I believe will be out later this year.
The other trend that I want to point to, beyond the shipped
between reading on the screen and reading on paper,
is that it is also becoming clearer now, as we do more with screens,
just what paper is actually good for now.
And some of the ways that paper remains a superior technology
for reading and use, and here I want to point to a book that came
out a few years ago by Abby Sellen and Richard Harper called,
The Myth of the Paperless Office, with some very interesting studies
about paper use and reading.
And one of the things that remains, that is very clear,
and remains true is that we know how
to manipulate pages in very fluid ways.
We know how to spread multiple sheets of paper out and to refer
to them, and so far, digital technologies have not really been
up to the task of producing navigation schemes that are nearly
as good as what we have on paper.
What's more, our ability to spread out multiple windows
on a screen is an impoverished way of looking at multiple pages
or documents, compared to what we do all the time when we spread
out multiple sheets of paper.
So there are advantages and disadvantages, but the truth is,
that the new technologies are a moving target,
and just as five years ago, it wasn't clear
that people would be doing as much reading on the screen
as they are today, it's clear that things are going
to be interestingly different in yet another five years and beyond.
Okay. The other thing I wanted to talk about regarding reading though,
is that it looks very much -- well, I probably don't need to tell any
of you that we are in a world of vast multitasking,
where endless discussion of the way our attention is increasingly
fragmented, and how so few of us seem to have enough time.
And that, of course, is clearly affecting what we read,
when we read, and how we read.
Just this Thursday, this last Thursday in the "Circuit" section
of The New York Times, Katie Hafner wrote an article called,
"You There at the Computer, Pay Attention,"
and she ends this lovely little article by talking
about a San Francisco corporate lawyer named Peter Hecker [spelled
phonetically], and this is what she says.
This is a quote from the article: "Peter Hecker, a corporate lawyer
in San Francisco, said that when he hears the chiming alert
of new E-mail, he forces himself to continue working
for 30 seconds before looking at it."
And then she goes on to say, "30 seconds mind you, not 30 minutes."
Right? So something is going on, where a lot of us,
and I include myself in this, where a lot of us are living
in environments where we are capable of, and allowing ourselves,
to be interrupted by a multiplicity of devices, and I think it's clear
that this is changing the way that we read,
that we read in smaller fragments, that we allow ourselves
to be interrupted, and there are serious questions
about what it means to read in deep
and extended ways, in such a culture.
Again, Kathy Marshall has observed that people, whether they're reading
on paper or on the screen, are following strategies that are kind
of progressive, where you see a headline
that you think is interesting, so maybe you put that aside,
and maybe at some point, you'll go back to look at it,
and these are progressive reading strategies, rather than looking
at something initially, and reading all the way through.
It's been suggested by scholars of the book that a shift
in reading happened in the 18th century when, for centuries,
people had read intensively.
People had access to a smaller number of books,
so they would read deeply.
The practice of Lexio Divina, a practice of deep reading,
almost a kind of meditative reading, is an example of the kind
of intensive reading that there was a time when people engaged in.
But the suggestion is, that beginning in the 18th century,
either there was a rage for reading;
people started reading more materials,
more people were literate, and you have the sense,
like this illustration, of more things being read,
but still a kind of, I would say, a depth of focus and attention.
And I have actually begun to wonder if we aren't now moving
from extensive reading to hyper-extensive reading,
as we now increasingly live in a very hyper culture.
So that's what I wanted to say about reading.
I want to move on to say, to offer a few observations
about what's happening to the library.
The image, by the way, that I'm showing you,
is of our beautiful reading room at the University
of Washington Library, which is called the Suzzalo Reading Room,
and here too, with regard to libraries,
I think we are getting beyond the simple and simplistic rhetoric
of five to ten years ago, which was about the death of the library.
I think we're getting clearer on the value that libraries provide,
and how they are, they do remain, and will remain, an important piece
in this larger shifting ecosystem.
One observation to make is that, over the last ten years,
huge amounts of money have been poured into public libraries,
into the building of new libraries,
and the refurbishing of old libraries.
In Seattle, where I live, $200 million of public money was spent
to build the beautiful and exciting new Seattle Public Library downtown,
and also, to refurbish the older branch libraries.
And I think that one part of what we're beginning to see is that one
of the vital roles that libraries have to play in the future, as now,
is libraries as place; libraries are vital and exciting
and important spaces in local communities:
places where the community comes together, where people read,
where they browse, where they study,
where they congregate, where they go online.
My colleagues at The Information School, Karen Fisher,
Matthew Saxton, and Jens Erik Maj [spelled phonetically] have been
doing a very interesting study, which they are now completing,
on the library as place, and looking specifically at the role
of the physical library, the Seattle Public Library,
in the local community.
Of course, at the same time that we see all this, the understanding
of the role of the library in a digital era increasing we're,
of course, seeing fantastic things being done digitally online.
We see the growth of many digital collections in libraries.
We see the work that the Library of Congress has been doing to put parts
of its collection online, and make them available to the world.
I want to point to one trend that I think we're just about to see grow,
which is a movement toward a concern for personal digital libraries.
Now that we have lots more space on our disks,
on our personal computers, and lots more information is available
digitally, that we can save, there's going to be a whole, I think,
research development, which is about,
how do we create personal libraries, personal digital libraries?
I was just, a couple of weeks ago, at a wonderful NSF funded workshop
at the University of Washington on personal information management,
which was organized by my colleagues William Jones and Harry Bruce,
which was in part, looking at the possibility and the need
for the creation of tools to manage digital collections.
But my larger point, really, regarding libraries,
is simply again, that we live in, and will continue to live in,
a heterogeneous and hybrid world, and there is room for that.
There is room in there, and there is a need for the library as well
as for digital collections and libraries.
You can see librarians becoming increasingly comfortable, I think,
with their relationship to the digital future, specifically,
for example, with the recent announcement, I think,
in December that Google was planning to digitize as many
as 30 million books in the next six to ten years, and I think, overall,
a very positive reception by librarians,
who see that as a great thing to do.
What's more, Google is partnering with various libraries to do it;
like Stanford, University of Michigan,
and the New York City Public Library.
Okay. So I've told you a little bit about how I see the ecosystem,
the ecology of communication and media changing.
I want to step back for this last bit of my remarks,
and I want to talk about the way that I see books and libraries
as a very powerful and important symbol, as a symbol in our culture;
a symbol that I think we almost desperately need
to pay attention to, because books and libraries,
although they have always been about many things, the symbol,
the symbolic image in our culture is of deep reading
and contemplation and reflection.
And you might ask, well, why is this important?
Some of the founders of both the French Republic
and the United States, in particular,
Condochse [spelled phonetically] in France, and Thomas Jefferson here
in our own country, as Carla Hess, a historian at UC Berkeley points out,
they both felt that the success of a democratic society would depend
on citizens being able to reflect deeply about shared issues,
and they felt that books were a very important medium in which to conduct
that kind of reflection, because books take a long time to write,
as I certainly know, and they take a relatively long time to read.
And for people like Condochse and Jefferson, they were worried
about a culture that would get overheated by pamphlets
and broadsides, which could be translated into E-mail and blogs
in today's culture, and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
So they felt that there needed to be,
that democratic society would require a certain kind
of deliberation.
And I know that I'm not alone in worrying and being concerned
that something is happening today in our culture.
The sense of information overload, the sense of business,
the speedup of everyday life,
our fragmented attention is being commented on endlessly;
books with titles like, Media Unlimited, American Mania, Faster;
titles of articles, "Technology Has a Soul," "Plugged into Data,
"We've Turned Off," "Time to Do Everything Except Think,"
"Always On-the-job," "Employees Pay with Health" --
this is a very broad discussion and concern that is emerging
in our culture, and I want to, in this regard,
I want to read you the very last bit of Katie Hafner's article
in The New York Times last Thursday.
She's still talking about this corporate attorney, Mr. Hecker,
and she quotes him as saying, "Deep thought for half an hour?
Boy, that's hard."
And then he goes on, "Does any one ever really have deep thoughts
for half an hour anymore?"   And that's the way the article ends.

Now you might say, although you might not, you might know the answer
to this already; why is a problem?
Why is it a problem if deep thought seems
to be disappearing, and the speedup?
Well, it's becoming clear that our physical and emotional
and psychological health is at risk in various ways.
It's clear that issues of productivity and quality
of work have the potential to suffer
when we are skimming over the surface.
And there are also, I think, real concerns about our ethical lives,
and whether we can make wise decisions
when everything is going so fast.
Two quotes; one is from the novelist Richard Ford,
who wrote an op-ed piece seven years ago now, I think, approximately,
where he said, "The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me."
Or between 25 and 30 years ago, very presciently, the economist,
who won a Nobel Prize in economics, Herbert Simon, said,
"In a world where information is relatively scarce,
and where problems for decision are few and simple,
information is always a positive good.
In a world where attention is a scarce resource,
information may be an expensive luxury,
for it may turn our attention
from what is important to what is unimportant."
There's both the issue of productivity and quality,
but also the ethical concern; it may turn our attention
from what is important to what is unimportant.
We cannot afford to attend
to information simply because it's there.
So there are, I think, a broad range of concerns
on personal and societal level.
And what I have come to feel is that we are, perhaps, at the beginning
of a new movement, which might draw its parallel
with the environmental movement.
You'll remember that it's been about 40 years
since Rachel Carson published, Silent Spring -- thank you everyone,
it just went out of my head, thank you --
since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring,
and 1970 was the first Earth Day, and over this period of time,
we have increasingly come to realize that, unchecked urbanization
and industrialization has the potential
to destroy the natural environment, and everything that we hold dear.
And so we have come to understand that this natural ecology requires,
it requires old-growth forests.   It requires marshlands, and so on.

And I'm beginning to feel that we are at the beginning of realizing
that our information environment, or our information ecology is in danger
as well, and that we need to, we need to begin,
as a culture as a whole, to talk about the kinds of times and spaces
that also need to be protected: periods of silence,
forms of sanctuary, where we can, either be unplugged
or where we can actually come back to a fuller sense of our humanity
and ourselves, and reflect more deeply.
And I think there are opportunities for technology development as well,
for how the technology can support a more contemplative
and reflective set of activities than it currently seems to be doing.
And I should add that, along these lines,
I organize a conference this last May at the University
of Washington called, "Information, Silence and Sanctuary,"
where I brought together technologists,
academics of various stripes, religious leaders and artists,
to talk about how we can begin to think
about bringing the more contemplative
and reflective dimension back into our lives.
I guess the place I want to end is by just suggesting to you
that when we think about the possibility
of these important dimensions
of human life being more fully exercised and brought back for us,
that one of the things we can do is look for models, existing models,
that exist in the culture, which may also give us some help
in figuring out how we move forward.
And one of the places that, I think, in our culture, that is,
that offers some guidance is the library.
In fact, the IBM ad that this is a reconstruction
of said, has the following text.   It says, "In deep halcyon repose,"

and it gives the dictionary definition of halcyon as peaceful.
So the ad is actually partly offering, I think,
a direction for us; very, very clever of IBM and the ad people
who put this together, because it's suggesting that we need, I think,
we want and need books and libraries,
and as well as digital materials, but we want the peaceful spaces,
and we need the peaceful spaces and times, which will allow us
to reflect in the ways that we need to, if we're going
to solve the problems that face us in our society.
Thank you very much.
[applause] Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: So perhaps now,
Glenn Hauptmann might give his response.
Do you want to give it from where you're sitting?
I think it's just as well if we sort of stay here altogether.

Glenn Hauptmann: I'll discuss my friends over here shortly.
First I'd like to say that I've had a wonderful conversation with David
over the last three weeks that we've never spoken to one another,
and that comes, basically, from reading his book,
and arguing with his book, and I'm not going to argue with you here,
but there are some things that David brings
out that I think are very important in terms of pointing to issues
that really need to be addressed over the next evolution
of the ecology of the book, and the several years that this might take.
The one thing that I am most concerned
about is what we call knowledge.
We refer to knowledge, and we organize it
in some very specific ways, and those means
for organizing knowledge have become the institutions by which,
whether we possess knowledge or not, or whether we can transmit knowledge
or validate it or somehow use to evaluate our expression
of that knowledge, and reducing the complexity of experience
to the economic unit of a page, may not be the best thing to do,
as our friends over here are trying to do.
And I'll keep going back to them occasionally.
If we don't change the principal unit of representation,
the representational unit, the metaphor of the page,
then perhaps the evolution that you're talking
about will be stalled, if not stillborn.
The design of concepts for representation,
and the way in which we integrate, an associative thinking,
thinking that comes from a variety of experiences, gets stuck
and limited when we start trying to put it into a page.
It's very nice to pick up a book and read it and see someone's thinking
as they've progressed from one idea to the next,
and as they've presented it for us to engage,
but it becomes very different when it's a conversation
across a variety of media.
Unfortunately, we've never really learned how
to integrate all the various media.   We have radio.

We have television.   We have video.

We have books, newspapers, electronic media,
but there isn't any one program or one system that really allows us
to integrate those various expressions and means
of representation so that they are coherent.
And that is a major evolution that needs to take place.
Unfortunately, there was a very interesting experiment
in the late '70s or early '80s with X-Windows, where you had multiple,
concurrent windows on a screen in a UNIX environment.
Unfortunately, that experiment has gone away,
and we no longer look at multiple windows.
One of the scenes in a movie that I always loved was Steve McQueen
in the original Thomas Crown Affair, where he's sitting at his desk,
and he sees one of his crooks, and he's telling him what to do,
and then there's a grid, and then another one pops up,
and then all of a sudden, you see that they've come together in a way
that only his mind possesses.
None of the others knew each other, would ever see each other,
other than those few moments together
as they were robbing a bank -- not that I'm recommending robbing a bank
as a way of gaining knowledge, but nonetheless, there was this moment
where Steve McQueen saw the components, then saw everything,
and then saw it come part as they went in their different directions.
We don't have that capacity in our physical media to do what we can do
with knowledge, and a variety of different representations.
Unfortunately, our friends over here got very taken up with the notion
of the scroll, and as opposed to breaking the metaphor as they went
into using electronic technology, all they see in themselves able
to do is create more scrolls, and that seems to be the problem
with electronic media, as I see it today.
We have taken a major opportunity to integrate knowledge across a variety
of representations, explore new ways, new epistemologies
if you will, for organizing and representing, if not teaching,
if not assessing, that old evaluative term that we use
in schools still, and we go back to this page, this scroll,
this linear representation, in spite of what the opportunity represents.
And if there's an argument that I was going to have with you
in the book, it was that there wasn't an argument
for breaking those epistemologies.
The challenge that we have is that we are, we are dominated by trends,
by goals and objectives that are very laudable.
They, you know, they produce wonderful books.
That picture of you with the computer and the books
around you this sort of like my basement.
It's, you know, despite my railing against the texts,
there's a major role for it.
It's a matter of how we loosen the bonds that have created them
so that there are alternative forms of expression and representation.

Prosser Gifford: I'd like to pick up on David's last point,
because it seems to me the really important one.
Curiously, I'm much less concerned about technology.
I see the creation, I think some
of these modern technologies are absolutely marvelous;
the superposition of maps on top of each other to create --
I have a friend who is doing, I think,
marvelous work creating e-books powered by solar panels for places
like the Indian outback in South Africa,
because they don't have wires.   They don't need wires.

They don't need power if they have solar.
I think the technologies are marvelous.
My concern is that, however you do it,
it has to go through a single mind.
If you're going to create coherence, it's going to come here.
It's not going to come from that.   It's not going to come from this.

The coherence has gone to be created by a mind,
and let's not get too excited about modern technologies.
I had the opportunity when I was at Oxford,
to look at the original manuscript of Finnegan's Wake.
It was color-coded by Joyce.
He had colored pencils, and he underlined the scenes,
and he knew exactly what he was doing.
Readers find it very hard to know what he's doing,
but he knew what he was doing, and he was creating a multi-layered,
multi-level, multi-everything.
Or think about African dance: music, sculpture, movement,
symbolic significance, religious significance, they're all they are.
And it's a multi-task,
multi-everything event, so this is not new.
What troubles me, and I'm with David on this, and I think the end
of the book is really, is really beautiful,
and it ends even more powerfully then he ended his talk.
What we need is time to think.
It's all very well to have these marvelous technologies,
and to be able to do things,
and I believe that you can do things with the technologies.
Think of the Weather Channel.
Think of all those satellites going around,
and the information that it provides us.
But in the end, it's a single human mind that's going
to create the coherence, that's going to make it matter,
that's going to create for the rest of us the significance,
and that's not going to happen unless somebody takes time
to think about it.
And whether the thinking is on a machine or with a pencil on a pad,
it seems to me much less important than that the thinking happens,
and that the result is conveyable to the rest of us.
So whether the personal libraries or digital, or actual or mixed?
Again, it seems to me much less important
than that somebody use them, and use them to good effect,
and be able to absorb -- it's quite clear, it's always been clear
that people absorb information in different ways.
Some people digest bits and pieces from all sorts of things,
but then they think about it, and they put it together,
and it's that act of human creativity, it seems to me,
that's the key, and I think that's where David is so right
when he comes down to silence and reflection.
That's what we need more of.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: Can I add one thing to that,
because I think that David might answer.
I find, and I agree with both David and Prosser on this very strongly,
but I also would like to suggest
that the technology actually is not threatening us only
by the electronic technology, by supplying so much stimulation,
and so much acceleration, whatever it is that we're doing,
whether it's thinking or actually moving.
I was stunned by the story of the guy who was going to wait
for 30 seconds to answer his, you know, the call of his telephone,
and the deep thought for half an hour,
but it's a tremendously revealing issue, the deep thought,
the impossibility of holding a deep thought for half an hour
in a visualized, screenologized culture is coming
from another end as well.
We are immigrating intellectual and cognitive faculties from within,
where the books and learning to read have put it, into the screen,
and now it is through the hand, and on the keyboard
that we negotiate meaning with the screen.
It is externalized from our head.
The thinking is now done by the system.
My students, they don't read, they sample.
And sampling is very quick reading.   It's certainly not deep reading.

It's interesting juxtaposing.
It has its merits and its value and its quality,
but we really must interrogate, as well,
what the role of this immigration of the skills we have received,
including that of deep thinking, and of critical --
critical thinking begins in the middle ages
when people start really reading silently, and reading something
in the back of the room while the teacher was speaking
in the front has, hence criticizing the teacher's statement
for the first time, having a chance to actually say,
"I have voice which is different from the voice of the teacher."
So it's very interesting, that today, the voice is coming
from the screen, so we've got to deal with -- I mean, that's why,
in a way, brings the topic back to the question of page versus screen.
The screen does create an entirely different condition of,
a different cognitive condition, which is not favorable, I believe,
to anything deep, at any time.
But maybe more collective and connective stuff.
Deanna Markum: Let me begin
by thanking Dr. Levy first, and to our responders.
We're very grateful for your thoughtful comments.
We have a microphone now in the middle of the room, and you are free
to go to that microphone and ask questions.
I'll begin by reading a question from a viewer,
while you're thinking about your questions.
This is a question for the entire panel.
Why is it that digital books, e-books, have not taken off?
And why are they used by so few people?
Is it because it was technology driven, and people got confused?
It seems to me it is a really simple concept,
but the average person does not know anything about e-books.
Could you please comment on what happened with e-books?
David Levy: I'd be happy to start off.
I think e-books were a very useful and important experiment.
I think to a large extent, the effort was technology driven,
as the questioner points out.
And I think it's getting to be clear that e-books did not manage
to offer the advantages of paper --
sufficiently understand the value of paper.
At the same time, they didn't offer enough of the additional features
that you would hope for in a digital environment.
So it was just a very early experiment
that simply didn't give readers enough of what they really wanted.

Deanna Markum: Go ahead.
Glenn Hauptmann: It's interesting that Negroponte
from MIT is traveling around to a variety
of countries promoting this new idea of a $100 computer, and the problem
with the e-book here is, A, it was very expensive.
People were not prepared for reading on a screen necessarily.
I think, even since the first e-books came out,
screen resolution is better.
The interaction with the text, and it's not easy to necessarily think
through what an author of Alice in Wonderland was trying to do
in an e-book setting, unless you know
that this is a critical edition, and you're going to be exploring it.
Where I think e-books have an opportunity to evolve and to,
you know, to go through the various stages of your ecology would be
as textbook replacements where, once they free
up the baggage that's carried into school each day, put on the floor,
put on a desk, put back in the bag and carried out again
with relatively little use, the weight factor alone,
but more importantly, the type of information that could be brought
in on this type of an e-book
as a textbook replacement could be phenomenal.
So I think it's, you know, interesting to see
where it's failed, but the opportunity,
at this point, is immense, scratched.
Deanna Markum: One of the things I've seen in the statistics
from public libraries, when public libraries begin making e-books
available for circulation, the numbers have increased dramatically.
I think the early e-books were marketed to individuals,
and maybe marketing to libraries is a better strategy,
as we look at the statistics.
When people don't have to buy the e-books and can simply look
at them on the screen at home.
Prosser Gifford: I think the real opportunity for e-books is
when they're not competing with libraries and,
you know, Borders and all of this.
If you go out into areas of the world
where even the schools don't have textbooks,
and you solar power these things.
Then you've really got, you're really putting in the hands
of people something that they simply don't have,
and that's a very different kind of opportunity
than carrying an e-book around Washington DC.
Deanna Markum: Right.   Questions here?

Well, let's have another question from -- ah, we do have someone.
Male Speaker: I was curious if any of you paid serious attention
to the documents that fooled Dan Rather
and CBS News during the Presidential campaign, and obviously, I mean,
there were differences in the way computer's printed these documents,
I guess, as opposed to typewriters in the past.
But I'm wondering, the fact that people in the media may be
so involved in computer use or, you know, use not necessarily
with the written pages they used to be, that they were more open
to deception presently than they would have been, you know,
sometime in the not so recent, or not so distant past?
Deanna Markum: Who wants to comment on that?
Dave Levy: Sure.
Well first, I am afraid I didn't follow the story in detail,
so which is a shame, because I think, from a document
and print point of view, was a very interesting story about the fake.
But I think, I don't think that the media got fooled
because of their facility with the digital stuff.
I think that what we did see is a reflection on the speed up,
on the rate at which things are happening, and people rushing
to get stories out before they're fully vetted.
I think that's what it is, and not the technology.
I don't know if anyone else wants to say something.
Prosser Gifford: Let's not be --
I mean, I think forgery is an old and practiced art.
Think of the Vinland map, the alleged Viking map
that Yale promoted and then withdrew and then promoted again
and then withdrew, depending on the level of scholarship,
and it's taken all sorts of chemical analysis in inks and paper --
I mean, people can get fooled at all sorts of levels,
and it's not necessarily speed up.
Its lack of attention, and lack of questioning.
But it can be very sophisticated.
Deanna Markum: Follow up to that question or a new question?
Okay. Let me go first to read, a viewer and then to you.
This is a question from New Orleans: As a college student
in a modern Irish literature course, I was required
to read Joyce's Ulysses, a work that requires the reader to be versed
in a wide array of academic areas in order
to understand its many meanings.
I came across an HTML version of the novel in which a highlighted portion
of the text pointed to explanations of that selection.
Examples included translations from Hebrew to English,
and brief summaries of stories from Greek mythology.
I would be interested in hearing how the panel reacts to this kind
of document as a learning tool.
What are the pros and cons of such a tool?
David Levy: Well, I guess I would start
by saying, I think it's fabulous.   I think this is a beautiful example

of what the new technologies can do to supplement learning.
So, and in fact, Glenn, it's an example, clearly an example,
of where the page mold that you are concerned about is being broken
in major ways by hypertext.
It's a wonderful, it's a beautiful example.
Is there a follow-up to that?
Deanna Markum: Would you go to the microphone please?
Female Speaker: It doesn't seem different from a footnote,
is my only comment, not actually a question.
Glenn Hauptmann: It's major, it's phenomenally different
from a footnote if you're looking at the footnote in terms of a text.
About 15 years ago there was an effort to start collecting all
of Greek literature and various thesaurus dictionaries
and put together, so that when you read a text,
you can call up any number of different references
from archaeology, from museums, and the like.
And at the same time, a Shakespeare project was started,
where you could look at various performances
and cultural representations.
The Russian Hamlet is very different than the British Hamlet,
and why, and examine that.
If that is a footnote, then, you know, technology,
in this new e-book environment that might evolve has a tremendous amount
to offer in terms of providing end notes and footnotes.
But if we look at it as the tag at the end of a page,
or at the end of a chapter, then we're going to miss
out on what various nuances can be brought to us by media, expansion.
Prosser Gifford: I would fully agree.
It's a marking tool.
My only point is, Ulysses was written by one man.
He knew what he was talking about.
Deanna Markum: It really is a matter of voices, isn't it?
How many different voices are brought into a document?
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: It's a new form of criticism to add, you know,
to add all this information around the text.
I think one of the problems we have with e-books is that we tend
to do this with new technologies, to give them old metaphors.
And so we're dealing with the word book, and people are expecting --
I got the Gutenberg Project in my --
I had at that time one of those things you could --
these palm Pilots where you can just download the, any book that was part
of the Gutenberg Project, where you could have a copy free,
a copyright free, material.
And reading on that stuff, as a book, felt very, very strange.
I'm not saying that the people outside [unintelligible] shouldn't
have the access to this, but I'm saying, for a person who have access
to everything else, it is not the best way to go about it.
But once you get into that new form of criticism,
which is adding all this footnotes to the actual text,
you're getting something totally different and very exciting.
David Levy: May I just add one last remark?
I thought that was a very interesting point, and indeed,
if you look at it from the point of view of the technology,
it does look like a hypertext link is essentially like a footnote.
But I think part of what we're suggesting is
that when you see the expansive uses that can be made
in the new technology, it's quite different.
And it reminds me of a story about the first time I saw the Web,
which was back in the early '90s,
before the Web had exploded into public use.
I was still a researcher at Xerox Park.
Tim Berners-Lee, who was the inventor, now considered
to be the primary inventor of the Web, was actually spending a month
at my research institution, and at the end of his month,
he gave a little demo, and this was before there were any Web browsers.
This was before Netscape, and basically what he did,
was he showed us -- there were maybe no more than 15 people sitting
in this little conference room.
He showed how he could connect from where we were, from the computer
where we were, to Lucerne in Switzerland and pull up a document,
right, by in effect, by following a hypertext link.
Well, I walked out of that room, having seen the future,
except that I walked out of there saying, "Big deal.
There's nothing new there."
It's, they were two older ideas that were coming together;
one was the idea of hypertext in a link, which had been around for
at least a decade, if not longer,
and the other was the use of the Internet.
So I guess the other lesson from this is, don't ever ask me
about stocks or anything like that
because I sure missed the Web, even though I saw it.
Deanna Markum: Sir.
Male Speaker: I'm wondering if I could ask really anyone to speak
to whether or not you think the new algorithms, the search algorithms,
and Google's the best-known -- I'm thinking of Apple Spotlight
and the forthcoming edition of OS10.
The capacity to, how to put it, the associative algorithms
that are present in some of these, the way in which
that might impact thinking.
In other words, to go beyond the hypertext kind
of thing you're suggesting, and I'm thinking of a particular article
that I read just in the last couple of weeks
where an author claimed he's now thinking outside
of where his normal thoughts would ordinarily go.
He was investigating waste disposal in cities.
Maybe some of you read this article as well, and how that had an impact
on structures, city structures, and the algorithm,
search algorithm went off with the waste notion, and pulled up the way
in which individual cells excrete calcium as a means
in which bones are ultimately developed in bodies;
that waste excretion at the cellular level was in part responsible
for development of bones and skeletons in animals.
He claimed he would never ever, it would never have occurred to him
to make that sort of an association.
And I'm wondering if you think there is that potential
in these new technologies.
Glenn Hauptmann: The glass is half-full or half-empty.
I mean, it's half-full in that the search engines, without focusing
on any one in particular, provide you the opportunity
to understand the semantic network of a broad set of terms
and conditions related to what it is
that you've asked about, very specifically.
And then broaden it by virtue of just looking
at how that word is used.
That can be very helpful if you yourself have the discipline
to then think through what the relationships are.
The half-empty side of this issue is
that the search engines do not come back and provide you
with a framework for organizing all the various component pieces
of the information that you've received.
That still remains the individual to associate that, to construct meaning
where there is nothing more than an associated list of some form
or another, based on the inputs that you made,
and the response of the formula.
So there's a long way for those engines to go.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: I'm very interested in that question,
and in fact, this cognitive dimension is happening.
It's not as if anything that's happening to our mind, I think,
still that single mind that does the thinking,
I agree with both of you on that.
It's not that our mind actually is so completely modified by media
that it becomes a monolithic structure
of thinking, a certain way of doing.
But I have this old joke; how many of you here read the horoscope?
There's one.
Well there's an honest person, there's another honest person here.
Very few honest persons in the room.
The point is, how do you read your horoscope?
It's been written for 350,000 people on that daily newspaper,
and there's no way you can do anything with that.
You can't say it's written for you.
But if you make it your own, how do you make it your own?
You pick up your something here, something there.
You put it together.   That's hypertext.

We've been thinking hypertextually since the very beginning of,
you know, hyrospects [spelled phonetically]
and divination and Oracular thinking.
Oracular thinking is hypertextual thinking.
The thing is that now, this is being brought
up by the user of the technology.
I was interested in what you're saying, David,
about your developing reading strategies.
You know, we are bookmarking our own reading text, that we will get back
to it later, as we would do with bookmarking,
which is a reading strategy.
There is a lot of cognitive change that is happening to us
because of the environments and the -- you have to know this:
every time that language changes horse,
that is changes support system, whether it's oral,
whether it's written, whether it's electronic,
every time we change our cognitive response to it.
Prosser Gifford: I'm not so sure that the kinds of information
that this search engine puts together is so very different
from the old-fashioned serendipity in, excuse me, book stacks.
I know you can't do that here anymore, but those of us
who remember those days, you could walk down the stacks,
and you would have a similar kind
of experience putting together unexpected, contingent,
serendipitous bits of information.   But what you made of them is here.

Deanna Markum: That really leads to another question from a viewer
in Amherst, New Hampshire, who wants to think a little bit more
about how libraries support contemplation
of digital information, and the question is, "What physical
and spatial attributes are essential for contemplation
of electronic information?
Could these spaces be created in nontraditional formats
such as neighboring early American houses,
rather than formal libraries."   He'd like to hear from the panel.

David Levy: Wow.
What a wonderful, what a wonderful question.
What a wonderfully provocative question.
First of all, just one slight correction,
at least from my point of view.
My argument is not that we specifically,
that we need contemplative spaces just for, or specifically
for digital materials, but for reflection and contemplation
in whatever form it's going to take, whatever we're doing at the moment.
But I think the question is enough.
I mean, I don't have an answer to it.
But simply, if we could, together, begin to think creatively
about the kinds of spaces that we actually want to create,
and I would actually speak back to the questioner and also
to anybody else in the audience and ask you to think about the times
when you really want to enter a more contemplative state.
Where do you go?   What do you do?

You know, is it in your living room?   Is it walking in nature?

Is it going to a house of worship?   Where do you go?

And I think there will be many different answers,
and there should be many possibilities in the future.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: I am reminded of an experience which was
with the Millennium Dome in London, which is the noisiest,
brassiest place that I have ever visited, because on top of it,
it was a kind of a fair place, but it was covered
by this enormous Dome, and the echoing effect,
it was just atrocious, it felt just terrible,
and no wonder it didn't work.
But within the umpteen things that you could do and you could see,
there was a room in that enormous chaos; there was a room,
which was created by an American artist whose name always escapes me,
but he's an expert in scrims and light,
and he creates depths of light.
And what he had done was a big egg, and on that egg there was a blue,
a bunch of blue screens and orange screens and every now and then,
just as the ring of a bell -- different kinds of bells;
it would happen with maybe three or four minutes interval.
There were five or six people at any time there, literally shelled
from that noise outside into that particular place, and I remember
that that contrast, the contrast between the horror
of just being assaulted by everything, and that enormous change
in that particular room was absolutely health making.
And I'm just proposing this as an environment where you might,
very well, create an environment like this in various places
for that literally, pulling out.
But it always has to be a place where you can do it very quickly,
because we have to get out of there and go back into the fray.
Deanna Markum: Thank you.
Male Speaker: It appears to me that, as individuals, we're all suffering
from the distractions of constant dialogue of information.
And what we need is a coherent way to frame
and direct our lives, and the time to do that.
My question to you is, do you think it's time for the question,
as an organizing principle, to take a more central role in our lives?
Perhaps an epistemology, a cataloging of the questions,
and that's sort of thing,
like a frequently asked questions to the extreme?
David Levy: That's a very cute idea.
So you're kind of saying, take the great questions of life maybe,
the deep ones, and produce a FAQ
which would create a collective set of the big questions.
Well, in part, I think that's what philosophy is, you know,
and each of our religious traditions also is, in its own way,
a kind of catalog of the human response to our existential plight.
Whether or not a Web site that was, you know, that was essentially a set
of FAQs like that would be of use to people, I'm not so sure.
Male Speaker: Well, more than a web site.
Maybe more like a reference tool, kind of like documenting all
of the questions, but not within necessarily that single Web site.
Prosser Gifford: I think the felt need for reflection
and contemplation is sort of built into us, and it's expressed
at different times by different kinds --
I mean, poets, certainly religious folks certainly, and people --
I don't think we're the first group of people who've felt harassed
by the speed of change, by the noise of cities: Florence,
London, in the 16th century.
And I think that different people have very different ways of coming
to terms with that, but I think it's quite clear
that that is a necessary aspect of the human condition,
whether its native American folklore or other kinds of folklore,
that the need for some sort of pulling away and peaceful reflection
on what the significance of all this is, seems to be very, very deep
and very, very old, and the technology, I think,
may get in the way, or it may not.   It may help.

But it's not going to change the need.
Deanna Markum: Yes.
Walking through the stacks, looking at materials from a century ago
or two centuries ago, you find the same concerns being expressed,
and they weren't, they weren't suffering from too much technology.
It is, it does seem to be part of the human condition.
Here's a question from a University of Maryland student: I find that,
as I spend time reading digital content, such as online newspapers,
I am forced to spend a large amount of time reading junk;
advertisements, links to other articles and other objects seem
to actually fill up a very large proportion of the screen,
compared to the actual content.
In addition, much of the information seems redundant.
Thus, even though the human mind has certainly progressed in its ability
to filter and block information,
do you think that this digital movement is also endangering
information itself?
David Levy: Oh, another, another wonderful question.
What's really hard to know is, I mean, if you take the story
that I'm telling about a shifting information ecology,
it's hard to know how much of what we're seeing and troubled by,
for example, the amount of junk, is it simply a transitional phase,
and how much of it is part of, is here with us for the long haul?
I mean, there are plenty of people who want to argue,
and I think there's real truth in this, that our infrastructures
of editing and sorting have not really caught
up with the technologies, and so in other words,
so that this is actually a transitional phase,
with regard to what we're seeing online, and that --
I mean, take an example, another kind of example
like junk mail, like spam.
Right? This is, I mean, ultimately, this is a phenomenon
that didn't exist ten years ago.   It's now at crisis proportions,

and but it is almost certainly something that, through a mixture
of technical and legal and social solutions,
is going to be brought under control.
Glenn Hauptmann: Part of what is happening on that newspaper page,
if you will, on the screen, the screen page,
is that you're experiencing the economic argument for how
that page is going to produce revenue for the person who's put
that page on the screen, and until there's some form of negotiation
as to how that will evolve, you are going to suffer through junk on top
of valuable information, and which is why one
of the major technological skills that we all need to really focus
on is this notion of discernment, and it will become very different
and much more important as this argument
between junk and information evolves.
Prosser Gifford: But isn't it true, I mean,
it seems to me this is one case where you can pick
up The New York Times or a Washington Post,
whatever paper you want, and it's full of ads, and it's full of lots
of other information, but any experienced reader can read through
and get the news or get the information if they want
to call it that, without paying attention to,
you know, next year's Volvo.
But it may be much less easy to do that on the screen.
Glenn Hauptmann: It is much less easy to do on the screen.
If I'm going through my pages here, and I can skip over something,
because I'm not interested in it, that's one thing,
but if it's flashing, and it's rotating, and it's jumping
out at me, and it's taking control
of my screen, it's a different story.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: That is exactly it.
The book is the only place where words actually stay still.
[laughter] Male Speaker: Derrick, what do you mean the only--
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: Think actually, they go there to rest.
I mean, I think it would be worth doing sometime, a comparative chart
of the various speeds of the media that we are dealing with.
They are very different speeds.
TV is different from radio, and radio is different from,
obviously from books and the Internet.
We are, and also in relation to the question of the junk that appears
on your -- it's in your face.   The screen is in your face.

That's the absolute, you know, that's the message of the screen.
So you can't escape it, and it does control you.
The reason I say it's worse talking about the stillness of the word
on the page is because, in fact, you do the running.
Your eyes do the control, not the machine.
The machine doesn't control you, but the reverse of power between self
and book that has occurred from screen to self.
It's a very, very big deal, psychologically true.
David Levy: But I guess one thing I would, Derrick, I would take issue
with is just that, you know, I'm not a technological determinist,
and I don't actually believe that screens and reading on screens has
to be noisy and vibrating at you in ways that you're talking about.
I don't actually think --
I do believe that there is the real possibility
of creating contemplative experiences
through the new technologies as well.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: Agreed.
Agreed. But they would have to shape, they would have to deal
with the lights coming right to you.
When you are reading, the right comes from behind and hits
like any kind old rennaisance situation, it hits the thing
and bounces back through you, and that too, is a freedom.
But if the light comes to you, you are painted.
Male Speaker: But you know what?
There is, there has been work over the last decade, at least in forms
of digital paper where, in fact, they were reflective and so on.
So all the technology is continuing to move.
Deanna Markum: You can turn off a lot --
we make choices about what to leave on and turn off.
Please. Female Speaker: Yes.   I have a question about the arts.

When I was listening to Professor Levy's lecture
that the arts are even, could be even more important
but mastering a form of art,
such as contemplation too would require patience and attention
and effort, but also, you know, to go to concerts and things like that
where you turn off the cell phone and things like that.
They almost set an example that the technology affects arts, but yet,
keep the essential element.
Also the use of space seen in museums
where both technology is encouraged, but also there are the spaces
for contemplation and silence.   David Levy: Thank you.

I think, I think you're really right about those remarks.
I think I would just add that, yes, the arts clearly have a place
in the ways that you're describing, and so do the crafts.
I don't want to make a strong distinction between arts
and crafts here, and for me at least, in my own learning
about this, it was really important that I went to London 20 years ago
to study calligraphy and book binding, by the way.
That was what my degree was in.
And because it was, it was in London, and it was in England
where the arts and crafts movement in the 19th century arose,
as a response to industrialization.
And I think the arts and the crafts, as well as libraries and museums,
are holding some dimension of this, of these concerns,
and possibly offering us directions to move in.
So thank you.
Deanna Markum: A question about writing.
This is, "Your observation on reading
and the digital future is thought-provoking.
But could you please also talk
about how the digital shift has affected writing.
Do you, panel members, write with a PC,
and how has that changed the way you write?"
Prosser Gifford: When I start writing, which always takes a lot
of time, I often times will draw out a map of what it is
that I'm thinking, what I'm trying to get too,
in terms of a point of view.
And then in many ways, the paper frees me,
much more so than the computer, because of the type
of word processing, if you will, that the computer forces me
to observe, unless I'm doing something that is very high
of hypermedia-ish, for the most part,
basic writing, I wind up on paper.
But when it comes to going beyond one idea
to show how it can be reflected in multiple contexts,
I have to go to the computer to bring together that media
so that it's, it takes advantage of what it is
that I've mapped out in a different way.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: I call that "The Penelope Complex."
Do you remember Penelope --
that, you know, in order to stay the suitors waiting for the return
of Ulysses, would weave, I suppose it must have been a pull
over for him, or something.
Anyway, but she would in the evening, and she would say,
"When my pullover is finished, I will then decide
on which suitor I will marry," because she was,
and she was just playing for time.
Anyway, every morning she would undo what she had done the night before.
That's exactly what happens to writing on a computer.
You right on the computer, you think, fantastic, wonderful.
I've done it.   You go to bed.

The next morning you look at it.   It's terrible.

You undo it.
It's, and you can do that with computers.
You wouldn't do that before when you typed the bloody thing,
because it was really, you know, too much work to retype it.
But now you can play around.   So I never get past the second page.

[laughter] [inaudible] Deanna Markum:
I think you have an interesting book there.
[laughter] Glenn Hauptmann: It depends entirely what books,
entirely on what you're writing.
Letters, memos, a lot of the work I do at the library is done right
on the computer, but if I'm trying to think carefully about a letter
or trying to compose something that takes time and reflection,
I do it on a yellow pad and a pen or a pencil, even better.
So I think it depends.   I don't think there's a rule here.

David Levy: I guess the one thing that I would add
from my own experience is that,
just as I've noticed my reading habits have been changing
over the last 20 years, so have my writing habits.
So there's been a real shift.
When I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, I had available
to me the very first network personal computers.
This was in the mid-and late '70s.
This was Xerox Park's invention of the computer called the Alto,
and it had a precursor to Microsoft Word, and so I --
and yet, in the late '70s, as I wrote my dissertation,
I would write out in longhand the first draft of a chapter.
Then I would type it in to the computer,
and that's where I would do all the editing.
And I wrote my dissertation over the course of about nine months.
By the end of that nine-month period,
I was no longer writing first on paper and then transferring it.
I was actually beginning to write digitally.
And the other thing I would add is that,
and something to echo what Prosser is saying,
is that it depends on what I'm writing.
If I'm really trying to reflect and take notes,
just to think about something in a kind of diffuse way,
I much prefer to do it with pen and paper, and as a former student
of calligraphy, I'm very attuned to the quality of the paper
and the quality of the pen moving on the paper, and there's a kind
of contemplative feel to that that's actually very important to me.
Glenn Hauptmann: To switch it from the writing to the reading,
I discovered letters from 1960s and '70s that I had buried
in my basement the other day, and each of them is an artifact.
It has a very different feel.   It has different penmanship.

It was written at a point in time
where the digital word wasn't important,
and I have not received a letter like that in a very, very long time,
and I don't think I have the same feeling about something
that I've printed out as an artifact in the same manner.
There is a definite shift.
Deanna Markum: And a final questioner from the microphone.
Male Speaker: Yeah.
I also was going to ask you about the creative process,
but I'm wondering if you all have noticed, to me,
what's been a disturbing trend of, well, with journalists,
also with scholars, with ministers, with students who, you know,
occasionally say they have done it deliberately,
but often they just say accidentally, you know,
they're going to their files and their creative writing process
and what they end up doing is plagiarizing someone else's work,
you know, knowingly or unknowingly, and I'm just wondering --
well, it seems to me that, with the new technology,
if you have an inclination to cheat or if you're careless,
it's easier to do that now than it may have been in the past.
Do you think so?
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: [unintelligible] used to say
that "A great artist steal.   The other ones just borrow."

[laughter] But it's true.
I think there's a generalized sampling approach to things.
It's not necessarily bad.
At first I was worried because, you know, it starts sort of digging
into the Google to find out where that sentence came,
and you often find it, you know, If a student have integrated a sentence
that doesn't really look like his or her style.
You can go and find it, but in the end, I mean, if it's just like that,
and it's very plain cheating, as you say, you of course don't want it,
because it helps nobody, and certainly not the student.
But there is a certain way today of getting the information,
putting it together in a very intelligent way by going
to get it online, and coming
up with a very original approach and very strong thought.
I don't call that cheating anymore.
I just call that a completely different strategy of sense making.
Deanna Markum: Any other comments?
Prosser Gifford: Again, the line is kind of fuzzy, isn't it?
Think of Pound's Cantos..
How much of that is the incorporation --
some of it awful, but some
of it quite marvelous -- of other people's stuff.
I mean, or think of the artists who, as Derrick suggests, clearly,
clearly borrow from other artists, sometimes with the intention
of making it clear, and other times,
with the intention of not making it clear.
I think it's very hard to --
it is easier to do that when it's all there on the screen.
You don't have to go find the books,
but I don't think the impulse is any different.
David Levy: Just one addition, which is kind of an advertisement
for another one of the talks in this series.
I believe that Lawrence Lessig is going to be speaking,
and he has some very interesting ways of looking at creativity,
copyright, and the incorporation of other people's materials,
so I think there will be a very interesting discussion
of that in some number of weeks.
Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove: I'm glad you brought that up
because Creative Commons, the idea of telling people, "Here,
what you see on the screen right there and you think is interesting
and you'd like to use it, go right ahead and use it
in such and such circumstances.
You don't have to pay and worry the way you had to worry
about not being able to show all these images were copyrighted."
I think this is quite an amazing kind of progress in human thinking,
the possibility of opening up this fantastic collaborative system.
It's a collaborative strategy for a large number of people
that can use on-screen material.
I find that extraordinarily revolutionary in approach
to what the proprietary approach we've always had to, "This is mine.
Thou shall not touch it," you know, Deanna Markum:
So unfortunately, our time is up.
But that's a good advertisement for coming back to hear Lawrence Lessig.
We'll see all of you then.
Thank you.   [applause]