On May 21, 2012, a group of Canadians fasted for 24 hours to protest the cutting of Katimavik, a national youth volunteer program.

The program was cut in the last federal budget, citing costliness. The program costs no more than sending a student to high school, while generating full-time volunteer work in communities. Eighty-five percent of the Katimavik budget is directly invested in communities. The cut was a bad decision.

One hundred and nineteen Canadians participated in the fast. The event was covered by eight media interviews across the country. More action is coming.

Show your support for Katimavik. Consider joining the next event, the Katimavik Day of Action, a protest through volunteer work on June 23. Many Katimavik alumni are lifelong volunteers in their communities. This payoff is never measured in government calculations. Raise awareness by signing on.

Write your Member of Parliament, urging a reversal to the cut. These letters make a real difference.

• Three chapters: 1. The Book is on Fire, 2. Double Space, 3. Generation Codex.
• 27 short essays
•  65 references

I have sought to entertain you by crafting this series with novel artifacts:

• The robot-reader visual theme
• The Facebook parallel
• An Android app
• A video
• Even some poetry

I, Reader is a writing lab, an experimental mix of writing, social media and software. I am using this series to dig deeper into the connections between connections between books, technology, brains and the souls of readers. Your participation, both lurking and loud, is making me smarter.

A major theme has been introduced using several views: technology is breaking the binding of books and changing us as readers. There is much to explore yet. Where is the open book going? Why is it that bookstores are closing while libraries keep reinventing themselves? Is there a link between the open book and end of privacy? Will we splay all our thoughts on the web? Is the human story reaching its natural end? What if we invented a truly digital codex, one that better served human thought? I, Reader is all about the two-step between human thought and technology.

A new and crafty idea has emerged. I wrote my first mobile app for I, Reader. I have another one in the works, the 10-Mile App. For now, I will just say it has fun “hyper-local” functions. It is a good blending of technology and human-scale knowledge. This conclusion to part one is a good point to pause while I complete the app. Once I am clear, I will return to write Part II of I, Reader, entitled “Open Reading.” Join me then to reboot the robot-reader.

Alexander Supertramp
Lost son of fortune
Vagabond and philanthropist, itinerant and mystic
Destination Alaska
Climactic battle to kill the false being within

Educated reader
London, Thoreau, Tolstoy
Sold paperbacks on the slabs
Packed more books than food
Happiness only real when shared

What would you say
If you met Alexander Supertramp on the road
Go find that girl and work for Wayne
Go home and love your folks
Write your book

If you meet the mystic on the road
You know what to do

The first idea was to gather 21 Canadians for the one day fast, a tribute to the 21-day hunger strike of Senator Jacques Hébert in 1986. The program was cut at that time, but Hébert’s passion and the determination of like-minded Canadians led to a new Katimavik that has been serving communities since 1994. The idea of the fast caught on quickly and our numbers are growing well past the original 21. We are represented by Canadians from across the country, by participants across generations and their supporters.

We hope this peaceful protest will prompt the government to reflect on the program’s great value to Canadian youth and communities, and cancel the proposed cut.

You can now access the Facebook page without a Facebook account. Link.

Twitter was a different animal. It was just a status bar, a single text box, 140 characters, nothing more. I tried it for awhile just to see what everyone was going on about. Line after line of snippets, often declaring nothing more than “Lunch!” or a link. I was supposed to watch this? Yuck. I deleted my account, publicly predicted its demise on the trash-heap of Web 2.0, and carried on blogging as before.

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. It rapidly gained popularity and currently has 140 million active user worldwide. I noticed the blogosphere change in 2007. Blog posts became less frequent. Fewer blogs were being created. The blogosphere was draining away to Twitter, or so it seemed. I was disappointed initially to see this trend, but it had a curious upside. Those who continued to write blogs were the ones who enjoyed long-form reading and writing. The blogosphere became more literary. Still, blog visits were dropping and comments scarcer. The online community was moving to Twitter.

If I was going to be a player I had to learn Twitter. I already knew the simple use of Twitter, but I needed to make better use of visualization technologies like TweetDeck and filters like hashtags. I did see that Twitter offered a very different view on the world, highly localized. Conferences can be boring if you just sit and listen to a speaker. The same event can be stimulating if you are interacting with its audience members thought by thought. Twitter provides a view we did not have before. I grokked it.

The shape of knowledge is changing, and we are changing with it. Twitter is one associated technology. Mobile is another. I held fast to long-form writing because I was certain that length was required for complex thought. I am not so certain anymore. Today I find myself more involved in my many communities because I have granular digital knowledge of what’s going on. I have to yet to see a displacement of core mental processing, but if I can call upon all the details I need, then configure and re-configure them on demand, then I have a new ability for complex thought, and it does not depend on complex planning or long-form reading. I am still considering the implications of that conclusion.

• Libraries as software – dematerialising, platforms and returning to first principles
• The Library as the People’s API
• Libraries are platforms?

The coming of the prophet had been foretold for millenia. She was only a girl when her parents brought her to the temple for the first time. It was a place of quiet reflection and books, and it was not the church. As she grew, the prophet and her companions often went to the temple. It was a common place for people to meet, and it was not the mall.  The time came when the prophet came into her power. She went to the temple and beheld how it had changed. Silence was no longer enforced. The wooden horses of access had been sent to pasture. Shelves of books had been pushed back to make way for the plastic boxes of data. Digits were the new currency in a marketplace of information transactions. Order had given way to complexity. The priests of knowledge had become the servants of the knowledge seekers. Should she take up a whip and drive them out? Oh no. She was in the library, and she deemed it very good.

I have had a long and satisfying relationship with libraries. It did not end with the usual trips to the public library as a child. I joined the library club in high school (what a nerd). After high school, I participated in a Canadian youth program called Katimavik in which I volunteered in libraries, teaching computers to the Inuit and preparing instructional materials for high school teachers in Saskatchewan. I was an undergrad in the late eighties. In first year I learned to use the library’s print indexes. The next year the library acquired its first digital indexes, CD-ROMs checked out from the front desk and viewed on one of four computer terminals. It was such an improvement, it was god’s gift to students. After my undergrad I thought about going to library school, but decided the information technology field had a better future.

Fifteen years later, libraries were thriving. I decided to go to library school after all. A graduate program demands papers, so I was back in the library. The CD-ROMs were gone. Its new core was an information commons with rows of computer terminals, also accessible online. Even in the days of the CD-ROMs the photocopiers were the workhorses of research, now a few remaining units gathered dust. The experience provided a clear comparison of the old and the new. Unquestionably, research was a much easier job. If I imagined that library school was a shelter for my old bookish ways I was wrong. Something changed in the nineties. Frustrated by the slowness and costs of techies doing their computer work for them, librarians became techies. They built their own systems and claimed their space online. Stifled by classrooms, I found the best part of my library education online, in the library blogs, where a generous community of librarians and information professionals eagerly engaged learners.

You may think I am too zealous about libraries. I will not disagree and my zeal is not quite finished.  In this chapter I hailed “Generation Codex” the last generation of a 2000 year equation between print and knowledge. That period coincides with the rise of Christianity and is attributed to it. The early Christians favoured the codex because it was easy to carry and conceal. Arguably, Christianity and the codex are also falling together. This chapter captured insights from the last generation of print. I could not help but slip into a first person perspective. I told a story of the Dutch immigrants, a people of the book, the Bible. No longer a believer, my soul is imprinted with the need for deep reading and metaphysical questioning. As church attendance declines, where does one go for refined insight and knowledge? Online, yes, it is a good place to start. Deep seeking also needs a shelter, a sanctuary, a place for its community to gather. The mall? No. Libraries, of course. Libraries are the new temples.

Image 1: Library of Parliament, Canada. Source.

Image 2: Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Source.

I will be going to a ”Save Katimavik” protest on Parliament Hill, Monday at 12 noon. For those not able to attend, there will be live broadcasting online at CUTV Montreal. You can learn more on Facebook and Twitter.

(painting and photo by Shannon Leigh Goodhead)

]]> Causes http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/johnmiedema/blog/~3/z40cZSi67xM/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/johnmiedema/~3/akcDo4EMQD0/ Katimavik is a Canadian program in which young people travel to different Canadian communities and do volunteer work. In the last federal budget, the government cancelled funding for the program. This was a bad decision that should be changed. In 1984, I lived in a small auto town in Southwestern Ontario. I had not traveled [...] http://blog.johnmiedema.ca/?p=415 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:33:54 +0000 Katimavik is a Canadian program in which young people travel to different Canadian communities and do volunteer work. In the last federal budget, the government cancelled funding for the program. This was a bad decision that should be changed.

In 1984, I lived in a small auto town in Southwestern Ontario. I had not traveled out of Ontario, and assumed the rest of Canada was much the same. I was just finishing grade 12. A friend of mine said he was thinking about signing up for Katimavik. “Katima-what?” I asked. Looking at his brochure I saw a rugged lifestyle in return for a dollar-a-day spending money. “Are you crazy?!” I asked. Not quite sure of what to do next myself, a week later I signed up. Over nine months I volunteered in three communities, English and French, with a group of other young Canadians. We raised the original foundations of Fort Frontenac in Kingston Ontario. We helped build the historic cable car park in North West River Labrador. We volunteered in the school library of St. Brieux Saskatchewan. The program expanded my sense of self and my identity as a multicultural Canadian. I learned self-sufficiency and job skills. I returned to my hometown a changed person. I know for certain that I changed direction at this point, thinking more broadly, going back to school, taking on challenges that have kept me an employed and engaged Canadian citizen. It became the foundation of my lifelong participation in Canadian political and cultural life.

Let’s face it, the funding of Katimavik has become a partisan issue. It was founded in the 1970′s by Trudeau’s Liberal government and later cut by Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives. It was re-instated after a massive protest by Canadians and the hunger strike of Senator Jacques Hebert. The program has been cut again by Harper’s Conservatives. We know that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives care about investing in youth too. Let’s take a moment to consider why that investment should continue in Katimavik. Nearly three generations since its inception, Katimavik is established in Canadian culture, an option seriously considered by many young people. Say “Katimavik” today and young people know what you mean. It is a program storied by past generations. It is wrong to cut it. On economic terms alone, the program has clear return-on-investment. The annual budget for 2010-2011 was 15.9 million. The volunteer work is valued at 10.7 million and the direct investments in communities at 13.9 million (Katimavik, 2012, PDF). Don’t let party politics wreck this.

You can help save Katimavik. Write to your MP,  the Prime Minister, and Minister James Moore. Join the campaigns. Tell your Katimavik stories. Thank you.

Hacker. It is a term often wrongly associated with cyber-crime. In Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham¹ describes hackers as those hands-on programmers who need to bend, break or invent patterns. This I, Reader series is about the connections between books and technology.  When it comes to books, hacking seems to be the order of the day. The emerging story is that in the days of print, the development of knowledge was an orderly process of research, writing, and publishing. With the advent of the web, the story continues, all that is getting turned on its head. People from all corners can research any amount of information and publish direct to the web. The fixed container of the book is being cracked open, transformed into e-books, applications, and networks. There is some truth in this story, however the subtext is that openness, hacking and innovation are values that emerge from digital technology. My experience tells me different.

I fancy myself a hacker, yet I am not naturally disposed to mathematics or technology. I have always had a preference for letters over numbers. Put me in an English class, reading Shakespeare or Steinbeck, my brain was on fire. In math class, three steps into a proof, my brain seized. Called upon to write my homework on the chalkboard I borrowed the solution of my smart math friend, Rob. It backfired when the teacher was impressed with my (his) brilliant solution and asked me to explain it. Zap. I preferred letters, Rob numbers, but we got along very well, playing Donkey Kong on his Intellivision, dreaming up programs for his Commodore 64. Somehow, I ended up working in the computer industry while Rob is a farmer. (He outsmarted me again.)

After completing a psychology degree I worked in health research for a couple of years. Quickly fed up with manually crunching numbers, I learned how to program Microsoft Excel. A course later, I passed Microsoft certifications in VB6 and found my way into a programmer’s job at an IT consulting company called LGS, just acquired by IBM. Though I nearly died in panic on my first assignment, I have since designed and built dozens of software systems for corporate clients, and patented a search technology. It seems I have an aptitude for technology after all.

People go into information technology for different reasons. I was drawn to the subgroup of programmers who in another economy might have been writers. These were the people who learned programming as teens to build text adventure games. These games allow a writer to create an entire world. It is irresistible to hackers who like to remake and improve the world. There is a core connection between coding and writing. No where is it clearer than in programming that technology is made out of text. Lines of code are written according to a syntax. Well-written code is beautiful, a statement that other programmers will read and admire. “Code is poetry,” say the makers of WordPress. As Graham says, hackers are motivated by a similar impulse as people drawn to writing, painting, and other arts.

In The Pattern on the Stone W. Daniel Hillis² describes the basic ideas that make computers work. He uses tic-tac-toe to introduce the idea of a universal computer. Inspired by him, I built a tic-tac-toe computer out of the same circuitry materials I used as a kid: a battery, wires, bulbs and switches. Seeing the thing work, a light bulb went on in my head. Computing is more basic than digital technology. The drive to openness, hacking and innovation is more basic than digital technology. Of course it is. Digital technology began as a hack. If books are being reinvented today, it is not because digital technology has permitted their liberation from print. No, quite the opposite, digital technology is built on text. As always in the human story, imagination and writing are the instruments of creation.

I stopped playing video games when I was fifteen. I remember the day, back in 1981. I had a part-time job sweeping floors at the local Chevy car dealership so I could afford to throw away a few quarters, but they always seemed spent too early. One day I decided to take a whole roll of quarters to the arcade. A roll is ten dollars, fourty quarters, fourty games. I wanted to get to the end of a SuperCobra, in which a helicopter flies across a terrain, armed with a gun and bombs. The copter has a dwindling fuel supply but you can increase it by blowing up fuel tanks. There is an end to the game, a finale after the first ten sections. I didn’t reach it. Twenty quarters into the game, I had come further than ever, but frankly I was bored. Nothing really new ever happened, just variations on a theme. The outcome was essentially predetermined. I stopped playing video games.

As a GenX, my teen years were a strange mix of books and technology. We read the classics in English. We read genre fantasy books and played Dungeons and Dragons. The game involves rolling multi-sided dice to resolve probabilities and the consultation of statistical tables. Personal computers were just emerging, and it was not long till we realized the potential of programming to facilitate the games. We programmed more. We gamed more. The more involved we became, the more books we read too. Writing programs encouraged some of us to try our hand at writing stories. It was a wild and wonderful mix of digital and print technologies.

Is the book evolving into a video game? The very point of e-books is to take advantage of digital technology. The ability to search is a no-brainer. The same should be true for annotation but this risks opening the text in a way that might let people steal the profit from publishers. What about books as entertainment? What does a book become when a publisher adds digital technology to a book to make it more fun? What technology will be added — audio, video, games? Perhaps the reader can choose options for the characters: male or female, young or older. Is this object still a book, or is it a movie, or a video game?

It is too easy to malign this development of books, and their apparent trajectory toward applications and video games. I am not convinced that we should be closed to their literary potential. Dr. Sara M. Grimes is an Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature and New Media at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. She tells of her experience growing up, playing the video game, Final Fantasy 7:

But at a certain stage one of the protagonists, Eris, is suddenly murdered by the bad guy. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. And I tried, replaying the level several times to see if I could save her if I did things differently. I’d spent hours with this character, watching her fall in love, building up her abilities, marveling as she evolved from a simple healer into a powerful magician. And I played the game even after Eris died but never really got over it. And later I discovered that millions of people all around the world had had that same deeply emotional reaction as I did to Eris’ death. It’s inspired songs, tributes and artwork.¹

Books have long been esteemed as the vessels of culture and quality. There are plenty of lousy books, of course, the ones heavily typed into genres, produced for those who will pay money to get more of the same. Genre is contrasted with literature. It is literature that has earned books their respected position. Just say the word, literature, and everyone knows you are talking quality. What does it mean to be literary? Not all genre is bad. Good writers know how to use the predictability of their genre in novel ways to surprise and delight readers. New genres are being created all the time; the forerunners deserve particular respect. To be literary is to be unpredictable, to break rules, to challenge the reader. In doing so, the work is generative, inspiring others to create new works. I see those qualities in Grimes’ video game. Print does not own literariness.

There will come a time when the way of print may be forgotten. It is worthwhile to pause and consider the experience of people growing up in the world of print. Literacy is the focus. Consider writing. The art of penmanship was taught in schools. It was a measure of achievement to be allowed to use a pen instead of a pencil when one’s handwriting was good enough. My children did not learn penmanship in school. Why bother? They will be using a laptop in their studies and jobs.

I learned to type on a manual Underwood in my father’s printing shop. I took a typing course in high school. I learned touch typing. Eight fingers on the middle row, the home row, and my fingers learned to find their keys without looking. I did not bother taking the “advanced” keyboarding class. It was a new class, introduced soon after the arrival of computers in the school. By that time, I was already using a keyboard daily, in the computer class, on my new personal computer. There was no such thing as typing or keyboarding class when my kids went to school. They spend hours a day on keyboards of all kinds, adept even using their “hunt and peck” method of typing. There was a time when it was distinctive to list WordPerfect on one’s resume. Today if you don’t know Word and half a dozen other programs you might be out of a job.

Do not mistake these reflections for nostalgia. There are only so many things a curriculum can contain. Add something, take something away. There are new competencies to be mastered. Just spend a moment considering if anything of value should not be lost. With each passing year I do more digitally: calendars, lists, editing. I still take my fastest and most complex notes by hand. Is it a skill yet to be mastered by Generation Codex, or is there a connection between print and complex thought not yet afforded by digital technology?

To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.

Aim for 30 minutes a day. You can squeeze in that half hour pretty easily if only, during your free moments—whenever you find yourself automatically switching on that boob tube, or firing up your laptop to check your favorite site, or scanning Twitter for something to pass the time—you pick up a meaningful work of literature. Reach for your e-reader, if you like. The Slow Books movement won’t stand opposed to technology on purely nostalgic or aesthetic grounds. (Kindles et al make books like War and Peace less heavy, not less substantive, and also ensure you’ll never lose your place.)

But Slow Books will have standards about what kinds of reading materials count towards your daily quota. Blog posts won’t, of course, but neither will newspaper pieces or even magazine articles.

Also excluded: non-literary books.

…

Read the article. (Thanks Dave)

Not to be fussy, but is it slow books or slow reading? I know they say slow food not slow eating, but that’s because the growing and preparation of the food is the main focus. To me, slow books would be about handcrafting beautiful books. Not a big deal. I enjoyed the article. I left this question as a comment on the article.

Space travel was an important theme, of course. Arguably, it was the computers that mattered more. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took us to the edge of the solar system, but the artificial intelligence, HAL, spooked and intrigued us most. In Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer, Deep Thought, gave us the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.¹ Asimov’s I, Robot series and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep puzzled out the ethics around machine life.

A wooly minded fascination with technology may lead to technological utopianism, but science fiction is a sandbox for asking difficult social questions, a tool for critical thinking. The citizens in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness were neither male or female, an exploration of life without duality. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land introduced the term, “grok”, and invented the waterbed. It challenged traditional religion and social mores around love. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World cautioned how technology can be used to control people. Vigorous reading of science fiction shapes minds that are post-modern and critical.

Authority was being questioned and the censorship backlash predictable. Orwell’s 1984 had sex! Huxley’s Brave New World was banned for its supposed endorsement of free love, drugs, atheism and the rejection of the nuclear family; never mind that the book was a criticism of its fictional utopia. Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, of all books, still gets banned for offensive language. The internet is no guarantee of freedom from censorship. Think of Canada’s Bill C30, allowing the government to monitor what people are reading. It is astonishing to watch Canadians mobilize against bills like this. Bill C11 was about copyright; a generation ago no one cared about copyright legislation. Technologically savvy readers know where these bills are going, and freedom to read is their prime directive.

Digital technology led to cheap publishing and the internet. Suddenly books were everywhere and going digital. For a time it seemed as if information overload was a greater threat to censorship, eclipsing the time we used to spend reading books. Bit by bit, the filters got better, reducing the noise of the internet. More than that, readers have learned to accept that they cannot know a thing in its entirety. Knowledge has changed that way. Truth is more momentary and situational. We still read. Our brains have been reprogrammed to some extent, better able to scan volumes of information. Better too at picking out the good stuff, digits be damned, the good books that will claim some hours.

The terms, “digital native” and “digital immigrant” were coined by Mark Prensky¹. A digital native is a person born after the introduction of personal computer, and digital immigrant is one who is born before that time. Boomers and GenX are digital immigrants. Prensky observed the generational conflict between older teachers and supervisors using older methods of instruction with younger digital natives already living and breathing the new technologies. The terms enjoyed popular adoption but others have responded with critical research. Zur and Zur found that digital immigrants who are early adopters of technology are similar in ability to digital natives.² This finding does not negate the generational analysis by Prensky; it refines and clarifies components of it.

The notion of a digital immigrant has more intricacies. First generation digital natives are being raised by digital immigrants. The child born today inherits a world fashioned by elders who thought in books. The internet as we know it is one of the great feats of literacy, a vehicle of language, built on text-based programming languages. Digital immigrants and digital natives, we are all a people of the book.

The concept of a digital immigrant is still a useful one. Things are changing. Digital technology lends itself to more loosely organized thought, shifting clusters of meaning, and small stories; away from highly structured thought, epic narratives, and encyclopaedic knowledge. The internet of tomorrow may be a very different thing. GenX was the last generation of children to crossover from a world that was completely analogue in its technology to a new world dominated by digital technology. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, calls it a two-act play, an analogue youth and a digital adulthood.³ We need to write down and analyze the living memories of GenX and their immigration from the analogue to the digital world. Is there anything in that lifeworld that should not be lost? How did it fashion thought and identity? What has changed?

The Dutch immigrant communities were close knit. Their religious and cultural centre was the Christian Reformed Church, a protestant denomination, evangelical and Calvinist, emphasizing careful reading of the Bible. No child of Dutch immigrants was unfamiliar with the Bible. Three meals a day ended with a reading of scripture. My father cycled us though the entire book a few times. Visiting a Dutch classmate on a Saturday the lunchtime routine was the same, prayers and Bible reading. At the Christian school (the Dutch school some called it, with all those blonde heads) the curriculum was consistent with the theology. My grade eight science class was a pilot test for a Christian science text, Look to the Ants. Add to these readings two sermons on Sundays plus weekly meetings, clubs, and catechism classes. Reading with this intensity affects how you think and who you are. It shapes your identity and your community. We were a people of the book.

Young people became part of the adult community with a profession of faith ritual before the church. We prepared for this event by attending classes at the Minister’s house after church on Sundays. It was a pleasant affair, with coffee and cake, and light discussion of the Nicene Creed. After the second last class, I dropped out. I could not say why at the time. A few years later I would explain it as discomfort at the totality of the belief system, the unwillingness to admit that the whole Christian story might be wrong. The clergy paid lip service to doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Rejection of the faith was not an option. The unwillingness to admit uncertainty made all the adults in my life liars. It was not for me.

I fancied myself free of the influence of the church but I was wrong. For us television was evil but book reading was fine. I escaped into forbidden reading, Lord of the Rings and Catcher in the Rye. Was I so different from the first Christians preferred the print codex over the scroll because it was easier to hide from the authorities? In English classes at the public high school, I was the one who caught the Eden symbolism of the two rivers in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. In university I was drawn to the long essay courses in psychology and philosophy. In graduate school, I wrote a book, Slow Reading, about the benefits of reflective reading. I have long since settled my differences with the church. It is easy for a youth to cry hypocrisy but most of adults I knew were good people, better than their theology.  I am not a believer but I maintain a respect for religion as mythology in the sacred sense, scaffolds for engaging the unknown. My soul is imprinted with a weakness for deep reading and metaphysical questioning. I am a person of the book.

There are many reference management tools but most operate offline and others cost money. I wanted to collect references (web-based and print) from the web where possible and share them online. I looked at some of the free web-based tools. I had used BibMe when I was in school, even donated a couple dollars to the cause because it helped me in a pinch. Its search tool again matched more of my entries than other tools, sparing me the work of manual entry. Unfortunately, while it exports to different formats like APA it does not export to a machine standard like BibTeX. A machine standard is essential if you want the freedom to move between applications. CiteULike has a search tool but it did not match many of my entries. It does import and export to machine standards including BibTeX. It also displays a collection nicely. In the end, Zotero was the best choice for automatically compiling a list of references from the web. It reads embedded bibliographic data using COinS and other methods. Wikipedia articles and major newspapers are added seamlessly. Books are easily added after looking them up in Google Books. Zotero does not easily share references online but it does export to machine standards including BibTex. I imported my Zotero list into CiteULike.

I will continue to collect references in Zotero and share them via a link to my CiteULike collection tagged ireader.

This whole thing got started after I read about the launch of BibSoup, a new online reference tool. It is still in a beta state and the functionality is limited. I will keep my eye on it because it embraces radical openness, following the Open Biblio Principles encouraging the Open Definition of data. I know this matters. I chose to build OpenBook on the Open Library database, a project that embraced radical openness early in the game, and this was a big part of why OpenBook succeeded. OpenBook also added COinS for integration with Zotero, and Zotero has proven itself again today to be the best reference manager. Radical openness is a long term success strategy.

The web service permits you to create OpenBook HTML for a book that you can embed on any webpage, WordPress or otherwise. A sample client application demonstrates this. You can share the URL to the sample application so that others can generate OpenBook HTML. You can also write other client applications that use the web service directly. The web service is an alpha version, intended more for hackers and the curious. The only parameter is the book number. The templates and options are all hard-coded. The web service uses static styling and content elements that correspond to the default template 1.

Try the sample application | View the XML response (for techie eyes only) | Learn more

Be it resolved that “reading and writing are doomed” — that is the proposition of this debate. My worthy opponent, Mr. Mike Ridley, will defend this proposition. I know that Mike values literacy. He is an accomplished and respected librarian. But life is getting increasingly complex, Mike will tell you, so complex that the alphabet, our primary tool for thought is no longer up to the task. Reading and writing, he says, are doomed. I will challenge the proposition and defend literacy.

Back in 1979 Wendell Berry was called upon to offer a defense of literacy. To him it seemed absurd to offer a defense of literacy in a country in which everyone goes to school. Yet even in his day literacy was suffering among students because of the popular emphasis on “practical” skills”. It reminds me of Mike’s emphasis on life’s complexity, of the imperative to focus on skills that solve today’s  problems. Today those skills might include computer programming or bio-engineering. From this view, the teaching of language is reduced to an academic specialization rather than something of intrinsic value to all. In each generation, it seems, the value of literacy is challenged and needs a defense. Berry quotes Ezra Pound, “literature is news that stays news.” Literacy persists because it continues to answer the big picture complexities of life. As such, it is not doomed.

Literacy! We invented writing 5000 years ago. Before writing, communication was oral. Of course we continue to use oral speech today. In her book, Reading like a Writer, Francine Prose observes that we all learn to read by listening to those reading to us, word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase. In his book, Reading in the Brain, Dahaene explains that all reading is an attempt to recreate the spoken word. Written language is founded on spoken language. Why do I emphasize this? My challenge in this debate is not to prove that nothing will ever supplement literacy. Indeed we already have extensions to literacy. I only have to show that literacy is not doomed. I only argue that whatever comes, literacy, like oral communication, will continue to persist.

Literacy will persist not because we choose it but because our brains are wired that way. Dahaene goes on to explain that humans, unlike other species, were fortunate to have inherited cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry. All humans regardless of language use the same brain region, the “letterbox” to recognize letters. The brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words, a tight coupling between the brain and the original speech utterances.  5000 years of innovation have created reading technologies finely tuned to the wiring of our brains. We are not born to read, but human brains do not have an option other than literacy.

As a warm-up to our debate, Mike and I indulged in a blog dialogue. He contends that we are entering a post-literate era, one in which reading and writing are no longer necessary or common. I challenged Mike to define his vision of post-literacy. I appreciate that it is difficult to know the future. People in oral cultures surely did not know the future form of literacy. But in the end, if the issue is to be debated, it must have some sort of definition.

One possible candidate put forward for post-literacy is computer programming or engineering more generally. Machine intelligence may grind complex solutions to our complex problems. But is computer programming or machine intelligence different in kind than literacy? No, it is a clear example of an extension of literacy.  Unlike the spoken word, which fades as soon as it is said, the written word is a thing. The alphabet can be carved in wood or set in lead and printed. It is a thing, an object. It can be programmed. Technology is made out of text. The alphabet extends the life of ideas and makes them tangible so we can do sophisticated things with them. Over 5000 years we have refined the alphabet and the technologies of literacy: the pen, the book, publishing, and the internet. All of them extend literacy. Machine intelligence is just another extension of literacy. It is not doomed.

Perhaps post-literacy cannot be defined. Is it just a feeling? A wish for a new age? An Age of Aquarius in which humans will communicate on some new transcendent level? Futurism is good entertainment but is a poor predictor of what actually happens. Futurists always project from current trends and fail to account for counter-balancing forces. It seems desirable to process information more quickly but our brains have evolved such that new stimuli activate our neural pathways but our brains also inhibit neural activity to slow it down, to integrate it. If the acceleration continued unchecked our brain would seizure. Boundaries are necessary for intelligence. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that in any open-ended system the existing order or intelligence will follow the law of entropy and dissolve. Such is the fate of a post-literate world.

The matter is settled either way. If post-literacy can be defined – machine intelligence or whatever – then it can be shown to be an extension of literacy. If it cannot be defined it is just a puff of air, or an unsustainable system and no competition to the real-world tangible benefits of literacy.

What is the fate of libraries in a post-literate world? If literacy is doomed, then libraries are too. Is literacy a prison? You have heard that boundaries are essential to information processing.  Life is bounded. Books have binding and covers, a finite number of pages. Stories have endings. The boundedness of literacy is what makes it useful in the real world. Boundedness is classification, indexing, giving information a location. Boundedness equals location equals context equals meaning. Libraries are good at this. Fixed points of reference make information accessible and useful. Boundedness implies limits but not dead ends. Libraries can be bounded and open. I advocate for a future vision of libraries that extends its best traditional practices while embracing openness. I will give one well-defined example — a new mission for the public library, the advance of the “reader-scholar.” Information is increasingly open. The Open Access movement is making academic literature available for free to the public. The modern reader is increasingly enabled to do his or her own scholarly research, creating a smarter world.  The public library is the ideal place to support the emerging reader-scholar.

Literacy is not doomed. Literacy is thriving. Thank you.

Link. Text of the presentation.

The book, Slow Reading, also got a mention today at the Italian site, blog.casase.lt.

Reading in the BrainStanislas Dehaene; Penguin 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

Early into Reading in the Brain I knew I had found a very good book, packed with research and informed insight. As I began to read it, however, I noticed something odd. I was struggling with the Kindle edition I had purchased. I found myself wanting to physically grapple with the device more than the buttons would allow. The book contains diagrams that are useful to consult when reading the text but I could not easily cross-reference them. The book is lengthy and I found it difficult to track progress without the thickness of a print book. I had already enjoyed a few novels on my Kindle without this problem. This material was more challenging. I have read many similar scientific books before but always in print. For analytical reading the absence of tangible pages felt like a phantom pain. What was happening? Dahane’s book was compelling enough, and the digital challenge troublesome enough, to merit a second purchase of the more expensive print edition. The completed reading answered my question.

The reading paradox

Dahaene begins with the reading paradox. Our brains evolved over millions of years without writing. How is it that we can read? The hardware of our brains has not evolved in the mere 5000 year history of writing. New studies repeatedly show that the brain is more plastic that we thought but no so plastic as to invent new structures for reading. Dahaene explains that reading became possible for humans because we had the good fortune to inherit cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry.

Learning to read still takes years of training. It starts with visual recognition of shapes, e.g., “T” and “L”. The brain learns to detect subtle differences in words, e.g., “eight” vs “sight” while ignoring big ones, e.g., “eight” vs “EIGHT”. We do not scan words letter by letter from left to right like a computer program, but instead encode units of meaning for easy look-up, e.g, the morpheme “button” in “un-button-ing”.  The brain uses two pathways in parallel, sound and meaning, to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word. With sufficient training and practice reading seems virtually effortless.

We are not born to read. The only evolution that occurred was cultural — we optimized reading over the centuries to suit the brain. One more thing is needed. Why are cultural phenomena like reading so uniquely developed in humans? Dahaene attributes it the evolution of our prefrontal cortex. “My proposal is that this evolution results in a large-scale ‘neuronal workspace’ whose main function is to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge.” The workspace allowed us to exploit the cognitive niche made possible by neuronal recycling.

My brain needs re-training for reflective reading of e-books

I was struck by the tight coupling of brain structures with their physical counterparts in the world. Learning to read, the brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words. The aim of reading is still to reconstruct the original physical speech utterances. The skills required for processing text should be mostly transferable from print to digital books. After all, the text is still there. Indeed I find the reading of light or familiar material to be nearly equivalent on an e-reader.

When words are less familiar some slowness is to be expected. As Dehaene explains, we perform extra processing to decipher letters for rare or novel words before attempting to access their meaning. When words, sentences and paragraphs combine to express complex ideas much more processing is required. Reduced reading speed can be expected for reading abstract and challenging material regardless of the medium. To be sure, I wrestle with print books, snapping pages when I am unconvinced, wearing the binding from too much turning, attacking the text with a pen. I experienced this with the print edition of Reading in the Brain. I experienced a greater challenge when using the e-reader. How come?

I speculate a connection between reading technology and access to the neuronal workspace. Dahaene argues that literacy changed to suit the structures of the brain. The print book, the codex, is two thousand years old, a design that surpassed the scroll. It is an evolution of technology, finely tuned to our neurons to optimize reading. I can compel its knowledge. We assume the e-reader represents an advance on print because it embodies digital technology. Integrated with the web, it is easier to discover, purchase, search and link to other material. The text is readily ported to an e-reader and I can adjust its font-size for readability or play it aloud for listening. Still, the pages are continuous like the older scroll format. More important, I think, the global analysis functions are inferior to that of a print book: the single stream of focus, parallel access to pages, easy turning and cross-referencing across any two points. These are reflective reading functions that are used to “assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge,” the functions served by the neuronal workspace. If you think I am cutting too fine a point, recall the tight coupling between brain structures and the world.

I am certain that my brain is already being reprogrammed to work more efficiently with e-books. It is happening to all readers. This phase of re-training  explains some of the fourty year delay in the popular adoption of e-books. If my speculation is correct, e-reader design must evolve again if it is to finally compete equally with the print book. We have only seen the invention of a digital scroll but have yet to witness a truly digital codex. What would a digital codex look like? I offer a suggestion. The print codex introduced facing pages, a dual pane interface that has been mimicked by some e-reader designers. This effect could be amplified using multiple tabs like modern browsers, but within the e-reader. Better yet, I would like to be able to create any number of independent digital pages (or portions thereof) on a single digital desktop, all available at once in full-size for parallel processing. This is not the same as a browser with web content. It matters that the content is still unified within a dedicated reading device.

Reading is always at risk

E-books only make us stupid because we argue about them. While print is still the superior technology for reflective reading, if a truly digital codex was invented I would be the first in line to get one. Dehaene’s book focuses my attention on two more serious concerns. First, we are not born to read. The alphabet and literacy are cultural inventions finely tuned to our brains. Every generation must go through the hard work of learning to read. The internet does not offer a shortcut to knowledge. Second, the invention of reading re-purposed existing neural circuitry. Dahane suggests the mental “letterbox” we use for recognizing letters may have once been used for identifying animal tracks, a skill we have lost. Cortical reorganization is a competition, a zero sum game. As we re-train our brains for digital technology what skills will be lost? The capacity for long-form reflective reading, perhaps. Reading is always at risk.

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins; Mariner Books 2008
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It took many long thoughts before I was ready to write a response to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have tossed a lot of things in my religion closet over the years and was overdue for the cleaning this book provided. I still feel a bit raw.

I will give you my personal context as briefly as possible. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, believing the literal heaven and hell story as a child, rejecting it as a teen, and settling with agnosticism as an adult. I look back at the childhood experience as a positive one. I read the bible multiple times and can speak knowledgeably about it. It fashioned me into a reader and a philosophical thinker. Like any teen I decried hypocrisy. In truth most Christians were better people than their principles. My main contention was the general unwillingness to admit the religious story might be wrong. I still root out the occasional blind spot caused by fundamentalism but today I feel easily clear of its influence. I had settled into a cozy agnosticism when Dawkins’ book came along. I am not a new atheist and will not begin deriding theists. In fact, I am clearer on the role of religion though uncritical theists will not find in me an easy ally.

I am religious, just like Dawkins. In the opening chapter Dawkins describes a feeling, a profound sense of wonder at the vastness of the universe. The same feeling has been shared in religious terms by Sagan, Einstein, Hawking and other scientists. When these scientists talk about God they are doing so in a poetic sense. The God Delusion, says Dawkins, is not an attack on their God. No, his attack is not on the poetic thinkers but on the literalists. Put crudely, those who believe the fairy tale of a guy in the sky, waiting for you with pie when you die. Creation, heaven and hell, Jesus dying to save your immortal soul then coming back to life, miracles, the stuff you learn in Sunday school. Dawkins is using a rhetorical strategy. You can make a bold claim — God is a delusion — if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe”. Argue if you must, the religion begins with a naturalist testament, just like Dawkins.

God is not a empirical question. Either he exists or he doesn’t, says Dawkins. Who is being simple-minded? Tackling the origins of the universe Dawkins considers the two hypotheses of creation and evolution. Intelligence, he argues, occurs at the end of a process, i.e., evolution, not at the start, i.e., creation. In fact, that is only truly in a local context. According to physics, the universe was highly ordered matter, a singularity, and history has been the unfolding of the big bang. This is entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. The order or intelligence is found at the start of the process. My point is that big questions do not have simple true or false answers. There is the middle value, “mu”, often excluded, which rejects the context of the question as too small. Agnosticism seems a sensible response, but like the religion of the scientists, Dawkins argues away the agnosticism of great thinkers like Huxley.

Religion is poetry and we cannot live without it. Whenever one talks about God and the singularity the inevitable retort is that we are placing God in the “gaps”, the unknown things science hasn’t figured out yet. Yes, I say. That’s right. God is a poetic or mythological concept for mystery, the things we do not understand. Religion is false in the same way that Shakespeare is false. The events of his stories probably did not happen, but this does not stop us from retelling the stories, enacting them for audiences again and again. We quote his lines. It affects our decisions and changes our lives. Poetry, mythology, fiction, we constantly underestimate the vital role of these things in our lives.

Genuine religious belief is not consoling. New atheists explain religion as a comfort factor. Genuine religious belief is not consoling. Believers are challenged to reflect carefully on their thoughts and actions, live up to a rigourous moral code, and sacrifice their wants for the needs of others. It is a wonder that anyone would want to be religious. Dawkins provides a better explanation. A meme functions like a gene, but causing ideas to reproduce instead of DNA. Religious ideas are memetic because they require acceptance without question. It is a brilliant explanation. Modern theists accept the value of doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Not good enough. Genuine faith must be subject to constant critical examination. Not comfortable at all.

 Athiesm abets the ascendant religion of consumerism. I sometimes forget how powerful the pro-religious, anti-science lobby is in the United States. It explains some of the militance of the new atheist movement. Even in Canada, the pro-religious lobby is currently rising along with conservative politics and I oppose it. Still, on a larger scale, I observe the waning of Christianity and other religions as consumerism rises to replace them as the new religion. Atheism abets consumerism by overstating its rejection of religion. Dawkins, like me, is religious in a poetic sense, but unfortunately he reserves it as a special case. Without some poetry or mythology to imagine the unknown, we are reduced to creatures of physical matter alone, admitting only the things we can touch and taste, serving the economics of our want.

Say the words, “slow reading”, and you will have a reader’s attention. In a time of information overload, we all feel pressure to read more quickly. Three years ago I performed a Google search on slow reading. I found studies on dyslexia and eye disorders, advertising for speed reading courses, and complaints about the scanning rates of I/O devices. At the time I was doing a Master of Library and Information Science, and decided to undertake a broad search for research and concepts about the benefits of slow reading. The results were published in a little book aptly called, Slow Reading. I was surprised at the level of interest. Many of us share a quiet conviction that to read slowly is preferable at times. It is a pleasure when reading for recreation, and an aid to comprehension when studying a complex text. Today I will share with you the results of my search.

The concept of slow reading can be traced back to the practice of bibliophagy or book eating in the Bible, when prophets were commanded to eat a book to gain spiritual insight. The earliest explicit reference to slow reading is in Nietzsche’s preface to Daybreak where he defines his task as a philologist to be a teacher of slow reading. Today, scholars in the field of literary criticism practice close reading, the evaluation of a work through careful analysis of its text and language. English students often learn rigorous techniques to extract a work’s layers of meaning.

While prophets might obey divine commands to consume books, and scholars might use prescribed techniques for close reading, all of this may be sufficient to ward off a reader curious about slow reading. It need not be so. One professor complains that the literati are doing what her sex education nurse did in her seventh grade – forget to tell the students that the practice is quite fun.

In her book, Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose describes how she uses close reading to help students who find reading stressful. We all begin life as close readers, she says, learning to read by listening word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase to those reading to us. Prose transforms what has become drudgery for some into “the bliss of childhood reading when time, mercifully, stands still”.

The perception that slow reading is only for advanced readers is challenged by teachers who are innovating with slow reading techniques with students of all ages. I imagine many of you have re-read a favourite book. Faust & Glenzer used re-reading in the classroom. The title of their article came from the testimony of their children: I could read those parts over and over. The students readily grasped that re-reading literature is like watching movies and listening to music more than once.

Speed-reading courses teach students to read as fast as possible, but slow reading is not about reading as slow as possible all the time. One person savours each word while another skims, slowing down only for certain passages. Slow reading may involve arguing with a text, so to speak, or seeking out additional materials to add context. Some readers prefer the classics while many advanced readers rate half their pleasure reading as trash. Variability and personal control are essential in slow reading. As Virginia Woolf said, in the final analysis, no one can give another advice on what to read or how to read it.

A second stream of thought points to slow reading as an explanation for the persistence of print, books and libraries alongside the rise of digital technology.

The notion of a “paperless office” was coined in the seventies at the Palo Alto Research Center, formerly Xerox, “the paper people”. The now familiar idea was that digital documents would replace print. It grew into a popular conception about the death of print, books and bricks-and-mortar libraries. Fredrick Lancaster rose to prominence as a librarian who promoted a vision of a paperless library. His vision was a totalizing one. He did not foresee a combination of print and digital media but rather a complete displacement of print.

Many of us bought into the vision of a paperless society, and with good cause. In the eighties, the typewriter, the indispensable tool of writers for a century was superseded by the word processor. In the nineties we witnessed the mainstream integration of the web. By 2000, Google was busy digitizing libraries. Just this year, Amazon announced that e-books outsold hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Fourty years later, the paperless society is still just around the corner. Never mind that global production of print has tripled since the seventies. A downturn in 2008 was due to the recession not the Kindle, and figures are back up again. Amazon does not publish research, it advertises to increase sales. If you can buy ten 99 cent books for the price of one paperback then sales reflect an overall larger book pie. Two generations after the prediction of a paperless society, print, books, and libraries are thriving. How come? It is not a mystery to slow readers.

I was an early adopter of the Kindle. As Jeff Bezoes of Amazon promised, it is bookish. It has the dimensions of a paperback and is tapered to emulate the bulge of a book’s binding. It uses e-ink to simulate real print. I found the Kindle was good for the kind of reading in which I scroll from beginning to end without interruption. It was fine for my summer reads. I ran into problems using the Kindle for slow reading of longer, denser, richer material. Reflective reading requires more deft handling of pages than the Kindle’s buttons can manage. The note-taking functions were limited, preventing simple copy-paste operations from the device to my computer, no doubt due to DRM.

I am still waiting for the invention of an e-reader that surpasses the print codex for slow reading. It may not be possible. Print has one feature that undercuts digital technology: fixity. Fixity is the ability to capture an idea so that it can be read slowly and processed. No message notifications. No clicking away. An e-reader could only mimic this state by turning off all of its digital bells and whistles. For the Kindle to serve the purposes of slow reading, it must become a print book.

There is no question that digital technology is a major driver in the reinvention of libraries. But there is good evidence that it is the books that kept people coming back. The massive restructurings to offer digital services go largely unnoticed by users. This finding may dismay those with a futuristic bent, but it should send a signal to the library administrators and budget makers – avoid Lancaster’s mistake and instead plan for multiple futures of the book, both digital and print. In other words, continue planning around complex information needs, the tradition that has kept libraries thriving through the information age.

A third theme from my research on slow reading found connections with the larger Slow movement. In his book, In Praise of Slow, Carl Honoré documents the rise of Slow Food, an organization that promotes eating fresh local foods produced in season by sustainable farming practices. Honoré’s interest in the Slow Movement began with slow reading. One day in an airport he spotted a newspaper article on a series of condensed fairy tales called The One-Minute Bedtime Story. At first it struck him as brilliant – the cure to his nightly tug-of-war with his son’s demands for more stories – then the absurdity of his fast lifestyle called him to his senses. These days he goes into son’s room, leaving his watch behind and his computer turned off, and slows down to his son’s pace, talking about whatever as they read a story. It has changed from a task to be hurried to a reward to be cherished.

The Slow Food organization promotes local eating, and this theme of locality also fits with slow reading. Libraries have long been considered the physical embodiment of knowledge, the home of shelves of books. Within the library, one can be sure to find every item in the collection catalogued with a specific call number. In this ordered world, information clearly has a location.

The advent of the Web has called this view under scrutiny. Cloud computing, for example, promises a complete separation of physical hardware from it users. Information seems ethereal, transcending the limits of its container or physical embodiment. People tout e-books as a greener alternative. The pitch is good marketing but it caters to a false perception. Digital products occupy physical space, consume physical resources, and fill our dumps. Each megabyte moved across the web consumes energy. The Internet is a large, hungry creature placing a heavy footprint on our planet. The Slow Movement reminds us of the physical nature of our reading.

One day, perhaps, accelerating developments in technology will lead to a merger of human intelligence and machines. Our minds will be engineered to absorb information at an incredible pace and with penetrating depth. There is reason to be doubtful. Will the information mean the same thing? Can it maintain the desirable qualities associated with slowness, such as intimacy and sociability? Reading research suggests that slowness is in fact an important factor in understanding how we read and think.

Carver’s “rauding” theory proposes that we have five “gears” of reading. Unlike the first two gears of scanning and skimming, the third gear, rauding, includes comprehension and it is what we normally think of as reading. The last two gears are learning and memorizing; they are slower and more powerful than rauding. Carver found that most people read at a constant rate, their rauding rate, and it is best for comprehension of relatively easy material. When difficult material is encountered, individuals will temporarily shift down to slower rates of reading.

Reading is work for most of us and difficult for others. Dyslexia is a common cause of involuntary slow reading. Interestingly, dyslexia has a greater than chance association with increased creativity, including geniuses like Thomas Edison and accomplished performers such as Johnny Depp. What would be lost if we could fix dyslexia with surgery or force brains to read faster using technology? Our brains have evolved to use slowness as part of our overall information processing experience. This pattern points to a more fundamental design found throughout creation, the constant oscillation of a process to its opposite, yin-yang fashion, be that neural excitation and inhibition, sowing and reaping, kingdoms rising and falling, or the universe expanding and contracting. As fast as our minds become, ultimately slowness may be required to make the most of reading.

It is often said that a person can only read about five thousand books in a lifetime. It is a small range of books given the accelerating quantity available to us. This limitation might lead some readers to rush their reading, thereby increasing the number of books. This response turns a reader into a tourist, jumping from experience to experience, noting only the highlights, being able to say he or she has done it, though not entirely sure what was done. Another response is to simply and happily acknowledge that life is indeed short, and that our smaller selection of books represents a unique expression of our character. This second choice removes the needless pressure from reading, and restores it as a great pleasure.

The Bhagavad Gita
Eknath Easwaran; Vintage 2000
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A hundred years ago a wise old professor of mine recommended reading The Bhagavad Gita. I put it on my “to read” list but only read it yesterday. The reading was prompted by another, The Razor’s Edge, in which a pilgrim finds his way through books to enlightenment. Among them was the Upanishads, of which the Gita is considered a beautiful and accessible work. Of course I do not presume to “review” the Gita, but offer this brief reader’s response to it.

The Gita is the story of Arjuna, an Indian prince the night before battle. A powerful army has gathered to deny his rightful claim to the throne. He does not want to fight because the army contains members of his family. He receives counsel from Krishna, an apparent charioteer but in fact Lord Vishu, greatest of the Indian gods. The battle is a metaphor for the spirtual struggle, and Krishna provides personal guidance on the paths to enlightenment.

Enlightenment. Is it possible? I do not find it difficult to defend a world view that does not include a higher order or design, but I do so with diminishing conviction. There is sufficient complexity to evolution in a modern sense to explain a moral life, goodness for one’s people and future generations. Still, evolution is a downward-up drive. Up to where? If there is no higher order, is there only complexity expanding into entropy? I sometimes wonder if the brain of the atheist must finally collapse. The Gita speaks of shradda. Wrong shradda is sinking with the downward pull of our evolutionary past, not evil, only ignorant, leading to failure. Right shradda is consistent with the upward thrust of evolution, yielding better results. Easwaran says that shradda is more than faith, it is the belief system that defines a life, “One person with a serious illness believes he has a contribution to make to the world and so he recovers; another believes his life is worthless and he dies: that is the power of shradda.”

The Gita is not heavy with theology. Krishna explains that there are two main paths, one of knowledge and meditation for the few who prefer a life of solitude and contemplation. The more likely path is that of love and service, the path of action suited to most of us who prefer to live among others in the world. The paths ultimately reach the same end. A core Buddhist message is the impermanence of the ego, the illusion of a soul. “The ego’s job is to go on incessantly spinning the wheel of the mind and making new karma-pots: new ideas to act on, fresh desires to pursue.” Solitude gives a taste of egolessness since there are no other egos to bump against. The path of action exhausts the ego, yielding the same result. It is this path of action that Krisha recommends to Arjuna, faced with his difficult situation. Conditionality is our existence and Arjuna cannot escape the battle that is before him.

Arjuna must face his fears, but that is not the last word. A recurring theme in the Gita is to renounce attachment to the outcomes of our actions. We choose only our actions, and should make each act with care, an act of worship, an offering, but the results are beyond our control and should not engage us. It is the calculus of the serenity prayer, more familiar to modern readers.

The razor’s edge: a novelW. Somerset Maugham; Triangle books, the Blakiston company 1946WorldCat•Read Online•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham is the story of Laurence “Larry” Darrell, a young man who returned from war existentially troubled by the death of a close friend. Larry leaves his fiancée, Claire, for a year in Paris where he believes he can think through his troubled thoughts to their end. On his small veteran’s pension he rents a quiet room and studies, learning Greek to read classics in their original tongue, living a life of the spirit. Originally published in 1944, I had a 1946 hard cover (with double-spaced sentences) on my shelf for years and just recently read it. I reveled in every yellowed page of this monastic fantasy.

When Claire comes to Paris to fetch Larry after his year away, he declares his intention to continue. “‘But Larry’, she smiled. ‘People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now’”. Larry thinks she has said something shrewd. “But on the other hand you might say that if men has been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them.” Larry goes on travelling, ultimately finding his way to a monastery in India.

The defining moment for me in The Razor’s Edge is not the moment of Larry’s enlightenment, not the shuddering of his head as he awakens, and not the mountain vista as he fathoms the interconnectedness of all things. It was his action just after his enlightenment that stuck with me, the moment when Larry burns his books. The burning scene is not in the text of Maughm’s book, but it was added in the 1984 movie adaptation by John Byrum, starring Bill Murray in a rare serious role. I had seen the movie some years ago. It was the burning scene that brought me to the book this many years later.

I think often about books and their role in enlightenment. I think traditional literacy is essential in learning and “scientific” enlightenment. I also feel that “transcendental” enlightenment is post-literate. I wanted to read more on this matter, but it was not in the book. Byrum might have added the burning scene for its visual effect on the screen, but I think there is more to it. The road to enlightenment has traditionally been a literary one. In The Pilgrim’s Progress,  Christian begins his journey after being troubled by “the book in his hand”. Chris McCandless’ pilgrimage to Alaska had its start and finish in literature. The print version of The Razor’s Edge is narrated by the author, Maugham, serving as a messenger between the different worlds of Larry and Claire, and providing a more mature frame of reference. In the 1984 movie, Maugham’s character is absent. The powerful functions of Maugham, including the final dreadful confrontation with Claire, are assumed by Larry himself. This shift in focus away from the literary figure underscores my view that transcendental enlightenment is post-literate.

(There is also a 1946 movie adaptation by Edmund Goulding that I could barely finish watching. Both movies did a disservice to the feminine sexuality of Claire, and to the implied homosexuality of the character Elliott. The 1946 movie did a worse job of it. It also cleansed Sophie, and in so doing killed her character more tragically than the story.)

See also: Lost scenes: “I want you to learn more about books.”

Being and time
Martin Heidegger; Harper & Row 1962
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Being and Time by Martin Heidegger is a pillar of post-modernist thought, an essential reference for understanding the philosophy of mind and technology. Reading it is no small undertaking. Ontology is an abstract subject, requiring prior reading in the philosophy of mind, and familiarization with the new language introduced by Heidegger. On the first day of my existentialism class in 1990, the prof wagged her wise old head over the reading list, intoning, “it’s a tough slog”, debating whether or not to inflict the book on us. She did. Reading Being and Time was my real initiation into the art of slow reading. I pored over the book page by page, making careful notes as I read. I made good progress but I confess I stopped after two hundred pages, less than halfway through the book. I did not finish the book, but neither did Heidegger. A third part and a second book were supposed to follow but instead Heidegger retired to the Black Woods. Ontology does that to people.

Understanding Heidegger is essential as technology plays an increasing role in our lives. I rounded out my understanding of Heidegger in later years. Some excellent essays may be found in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon. If you want to read a small introduction, I recommend Heidegger, an excellent 56-page summary by Jonathan Rée. What follows is my own summary of the main concepts.

Ready-to-hand. Before we can inquire about the being of things, we must take a look at the inquirer — people, you and me, who ask about these things. Prior to any kind of inquiry about anything, people are just going about doing what they are doing, busy using the things of the world, carrying on their business, like reading this article. You are immersed in a stream of experience. Heidegger calls this state, “ready-to-hand.”

Presence-at-hand. It is only when something is askew that we reflectively notice a thing, and begin the activity of inquiry. You’re reading this article, and you notice a word misspelled or a concept you disagree with. Your focus then moves in on the thing, and you begin to analyze it. You regard the object of your attention as a “thing” that can be objectified and theorized about. Heidegger calls this state, “presence-at-hand.”

Inauthenticity. There is a natural tendency to apply this same kind of theoretical approach to ourselves and others. Descartes took this tendency to the extreme, depicting people as entities isolated from the world, looking out upon it. By extension, others are entities, distinctly separated from our viewpoint. Heidegger calls this perspective the “they-self”, a distortion of ourselves and our relations with others and the world, leading to a preoccupation with gossip, entertainment, and other triviality that reinforces or advances our status relative to others, trying to secure the substantiveness of fragile selves. Heidegger calls this state, “inauthenticity”.

Dasein. Heidegger argues that we are not isolated entities, distinct from others and the world. He introduces the concept of “Dasein”. We are first existences in the world, doing our business, involved in activities. We have being in the world before we do any kind of theoretical inquiry. In contrast to Cartesian solipsism, he coins the word, “Dasein”. We are openings to the world, having access to phenomena. We are fundamentally linked to the stream of experience. We must have this link, or it makes no sense to inquire into the nature of phenomena. It would be impossible to say anything sensible at all about phenomena without first having some kind of qualitative relationship. We are Dasein, windows to others and the world. Dasein is always “thown” into some circumstance. Where it is thrown, it cares about what is going on, and it projects into the future its plans for dealing with its circumstances. Dasein is first a window to its experience, and then a theorizer, planning a way to handle its experience.

Time. The main cause of inauthenticity is our tendency to regard time as a series of “now-points”. We tend to regard birth and death as distant facts. We consider out lives a finite resource of discrete units of time which we must fill. Hence, we fashion an “I-point” (the Cartesian self) which is a certain quantity of “now-points”. We intend to fill our life with a certain quantity of experiences that will define who we are. In fact, death is an ever present reality. This fact causes us anxiety, but authentically, we cannot pretend that our self is defined apart from birth and death. Our being is not measured by the now-points we fill. Our authentic being is a constant incompleteness, at any time to be ended by death. (Heidegger sounds like a Buddhist.)

What does all this have to do with modern technology? Heidegger introduced the famous example of the broken hammer that stops a worker and causes reflection. It applies to all tools and technologies. What is to be done when the hammer or information technology breaks? We become unnerved as our 24/7 electric blanket of technology cools off. Without vigilance, our analyses become inauthentic, self-serving spirals of falsity, having nothing to do with the original need to hammer. We invent mighty technologies that seem pretty cool but belie our original purpose. Reflection must be grounded in Dasein’s open view on the stream of experience.

If you have read this far, you have the stamina for Being and Time, and you have also earned a bonus. Download audio lectures of “Philosophy 185 Heidegger” by Hubert Dreyfus, Berkely.

The text of my speech. It was cut a little short because of time constraints, but the full speech is here.

The handout. Attendees have this in their folder, but here is a copy.

Thanks to one audience member who recommended an an essay I never heard of, but intend to read. Here is the reference:
Brower, Reuben (1963). Reading in slow motion. In The defense of reading. Dutton.

The article is a formalization and update of the blog posts I wrote as I developed OpenBook. I think of my blog as a scratchpad for ideas, meant to be rewritten more formally later on, after thinking it through and getting some feedback. The publication of this article is one example of that process.

BTW, there have been over 500 downloads of OpenBook, but only one rating (4/5). Are you using OpenBook? Care to rate it?

Thanks again to the great folks at Salt Lake City Public Library for hosting the event, and the attendees who generated such excellent discussion.

I have been doing research this term on Voluntary Slow Reading (VSR). On Saturday, March 29, I will be presenting my preliminary results via a poster session at the Western Research Forum. As part of that presentation, I am providing the draft results document here:

Download literature search results

Download final report

I have received comments in the past from students, grateful that someone thinks slow reading is a good idea. It’s no wonder given the heavy reading demands placed on students. Many students look forward to the day that they will be done school so they can start reading material of their own choosing again. Hopefully, they get a chance now and again during slow periods of the term.