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]]>James Fallows recently wrote a short essay on the Livescribe pen for the Atlantic, which he thinks is one of those game changing technologies "that makes all previous life seem backward." I'm not so sure, but I would say that this is another good example of where the forefront of device innovation is at right now.
One of the fallacies proposed by past internet theorists was that the virtual world would surpass the physical. That is, people would get lost online. As it turns out, the worlds have simply become blended. Online connections spill out into the real world coffee shops, as websites like Foursquare demonstrate in the most extreme.
The problem most people face then, is how to bring the two worlds together. There are simply too many social networks, email addresses, usernames and wifi hotspots to keep track of. This, it seems to me, is what is driving hardware innovation today. It is certainly what has given Apple the stock share edge. The problem is not just software as it was decades ago, a problem Windows could fix. Rather, the problem is the integration of both. Or, at least, the solution to the integration of digital and physical worlds is most often addressed in terms of physical interfaces that go well beyond point and click.
This bridging of digital and physical experience is what the iPhone and iPad are about. It's about putting the digital world literally in your hands. As Steve Jobs put it in his Keynote address which introduced the iPad, "The IPad is the best browsing experience you have ever had... [you can] hold the whole web in your hands." It's in this light that Pranav Mistry's SixthSense technology can be understood as a possible future for digital hardware. Mistry is developing a device which combines miniature camera and projection technology to allow people to bring the online world and real world together. If this gets to market in an accessible way, it is likely to make the iPhone look utterly archaic.
Allow me an explanatory digression:
The BBC recently produced a three part TV series called Sherlock. In a number of brilliant adaptations they set the famous Holmes and Watson duo in the contemporary era. Just as in the original, Dr. Watson is an Afghanistan war veteran, and just like the original, Holmes is a misanthropic genius with a penchant for detailed cultural analysis. I've often wondered how a Sherlock Holmes would cope in today's multicultural world which lacks the kinds of norms and social hierarchies of the nineteenth century. But here, the writers have cleverly extended Holmes' deductive powers with the technology of today, chiefly among them the "smart" phone. In one episode Holmes is able to deduce the location of the deceased woman by the weather updates he was able to find on his phone. So too, in the first episode's translation of the initial meeting between Holmes and Watson, Holmes has a look at Watson's phone, the twenty-first century version of the pocket watch. Just as in the original, Holmes is able to deduce a whole host of personal details about the doctor, such as the alcolohic nature of his "brother" from the device. Cleverly, however, it turns out that the inscription on the back is from Watson's lesbian sister. "There's always something," Holmes concedes after Watson corrects his gender oversight.
Here it seems, Holmes voices a concession to the complexity of contemporary life, a concession which echos our own experience. The writers of this new series ingeniously allow Holmes to use his phone to overcome today's multicultural complexity. In this way they point up the importance of this twenty-first century necessity. The smart phone is the astrolab of the middle ages, the pocket watch and compasses of the nineteenth century, but, maybe more, it puts a bit of genius within everyone's immediate reach.
The new Sherlock Holmes is an interesting example of what Mistry's SixthSense device might mean for ordinary people in the future. Imagine if whatever you were looking at immediately brought up projections of a range of relevant information? As it happens, in the new Holmes series, we are allowed to see these projections which, in the shows, allow us to see what Holmes sees, in one episode even the memorized map in Sherlock's head. Mistry speaks not only of breaking the barrier between digital and physical world, but the ability to leverage the digital world towards more human ends. That is, SixthSense has the potential to allow every human being to approximate the memory of Sherlock Holmes. It may even learn to approximate some of that deductive power as well.
However, crucially for a world weaning itself off of the codex reading device of the past two millennia, it is the logic of blending digital and physical worlds that makes the iPad a rather inferior reading device. Focused reading is becoming a thing of the past as our reading goes digital. This is why it seems the iPad is not necessarily proving to be a great reading device (as a rough survey of the Youtube reviews are indicating). As Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers put it in his Youtube review:
The thing about the iPad, I gotta tell ya, it’s beautiful and a lot of people really love it, especially people that use it for media consumption. Um, I’m still not that crazy about it. It’s a beautiful screen, there’s a ton of stuff you can do, and frankly, for reading, that is the problem because it’s so distracting. I’ll be reading a book which is a beautiful experience on the iBooks application. But then I want to go check my email or twitter something out and it’s a big distraction. I can’t get as immersed in it as I can in with the Kindle.
This is, in many ways, a very good summary of the two devices. The iPad has a handy user interface for reading pages of a kind, but it's completely linked into the rest of the online world. It's brilliant for media consumption, reading magazines, watching video clips, and reading online. Again, the logic of the device is to bring this digital world into your hands. However, users find it difficult to get lost in a book, as email and the constant ability to link out to other sources distracts them. This explains why so many of the reviewers of the new Kindle also have iPads. On the one hand, they are early adopters. On the other, they are lovers of books, and looking for a device which mimics the focused page by page experience of the codex.
Trouble is, the Kindle is now adding browsers, easy linking to Wikipedia and dictionaries, and the ability to share highlighted passages with Facebook. In other words, the Kindle is losing its focus as an attempt to mimic the focus of the codex. In many ways this is rooted in the Kindle platform itself, which does not include page numbers, but rather locations, a decision which makes it utterly unusable for teaching and scholarship which demands page citations. In this sense, the logic of the scroll is imbedded within the Kindle. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it will either end up looking just like an iPad in a few years, or, it will maintain its current marketing strategy along with Sony's e-readers, which weens codex users off their precious pages by mimicing the focus. This latter possibility will depend upon the purchasing power of the focused readers of the codex who justify a niche market for this specific technological innovation. In the end it may end up as an old person's device as the next generation of kids grow up on iPad like devices and laptops in their schools. In any case, like information technologies of the past, no one device ever fully eradicates the past devices. We still use scrolls to this day for graduation ceremonies.
In any case, I imagine that given the rate of innovation these days, it won't be long before we start to see a more catchy, user-friendly Livescribe, or something even more dramatic such as Mistry's SixthSense that more fully and seemlessly merges all the benefits of the online world with the real one. It's likely Apple will play its part, but it may be interesting to see if any new companies can outmode them with a simple, elegant multiplatform device. But the longterm success of such devices will likely impact the overall reading habits of people today, as the codex fades into the past.
So too, this may explain some of my interest in the longer history of the codex which takes us back to the beginning of the common era and the invention of the codex first remarked by Martial, a Roman poet and contemporary of Julius Caesar. I recently came across a brief summary of this history while quickly looking up some information on the table of contents in Pliny the Elder's Natural History:
Stitched together and protected by a cover, the parchment notebook was used for accounts, notes, drafts, and letters. The earliest evidence for its literary use is the poet Martial, who, writing toward the end of the first century AD, commends the new form to an unaccustomed public: "Assign your book-boxes to the great, this copy of me one hand can grasp." Because of its resemblance to a block of wood, the tablet came to be called a codex. There is a similar association in the Latin word for book (liber), which originally meant "bark." So, too, the Greek name for the papyrus plant, biblos, came to mean the roll made from it, then "book," and ultimately, the Bible.
And yet, the practical advantages of the codex in terms of size and convenience and the better, more durable protection offered by its covers were not, by themselves, sufficient reasons to replace the papyrus roll. That impetus came from the early Christian church, which adopted the form of the codex to differentiate its writings from the sacred books of Jewish scripture (which could be copied only in the format of the roll) and from pagan literature, which also was equated with the roll. More importantly, the codex permitted longer texts, such as the Gospels, to be contained within a single volume and to be referred to more easily. Although papyrus continued to be used by official scribes and copying houses and for literary production, as was the wooden tablet for more ephemeral material, by the second century AD, a shift from papyrus roll to parchment codex was evident. By the fourth century AD, Christianity had triumphed, and the codex replaced the roll, just as, in time, parchment replaced papyrus.
It was a development in the history of the book as monumental as the invention of printing a thousand years later.
It's not perfect, but it's very close to my view on these matters. Of course, the devil's in the details here, which, when explained, allow a more pervasive account of the codex, what it meant for western civilization, and what's its loss is likely to mean as well.
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Although my book's been out with SCM Press for the past month now in the United Kingdom, it has also just been made available in a more affordable paperback edition for the United States market by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf & Stock publishers.
Click here for further info from Wipf & Stock's website.
'Tim Stanley's book is a bold step towards thinking Barth differently. Controversial to those who consider Barth's theology as a dismissal of metaphysics, this book has affinities with the project the Finnish School are engaged in with respect to Martin Luther. It heralds a reappraisal of the relationship between Protestantism and metaphysics crucial to ecumenical dialogue today, and it lays the foundation for a new conception of Protestant ecclesiology. Tim Stanley is another young theologian to watch.'
Graham Ward, Head of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester.