Habits of Mind

I had a lovely lunch yesterday: a diverse bunch of historians sitting around the table and discussing -- politely but vigorously -- the relative merits of three good history books. It was a professional, intellectual and personal pleasure. I think people outside of academia overestimate how often this happens to us. This was a biannual meeting of a prize committee, the ΦΑΘ [Phi Alpha Theta] Baldridge prize for best history book by a Hawai'i author. I won't give away the winner because it hasn't officially been announced yet, but the discussion was lively because allthreebooks really were substantive, interesting, groundbreaking (all in different ways) and mostly successful. A good time was had by all.

In a sense, it was a very old-fashioned event. Each of us read the books -- actual, physical books -- which required that we mail them to each othen when we were finished. We gathered in one place, so that we could have a group discussion in person instead of an endless round of e-mails. In spite of the range of our research interests, we didn't create subcommittees or subcategories for the books, but considered them all together. Our agendas were pretty open: each of us revealed some scholarly biases and preferences, and each of us were required to account for them, and we all tried to see beyond our personal interests and professional specialities to achieve some generalized sense of quality. We reached an informed consensus instead of running an internet poll. Old-fashioned academic fun.

One of the books included, as part of its"where we go from here" conclusion, the following:

"Text-based visual ways of knowing are in a state of flux today, much like they were at the end of the seventeenth century. Hypertext, and the various audio and video recording and transmission technologies, are shifting the print-based ground over which scholars traditionally walk. New, disorienting ways of knowing are creeping in, and some old ways are back, disguised as new. Without admitting that our ways of knowing are habits rather than facts, there is no way to respond. This was McLuhan's point --"unconsciousness of any force is a disaster, especially one we have made ourselves."* We need not be victims of our own technologies, but unless we recognize shifts in perceptual habits that technology engenders over time, we can be nothing but the victims, never knowing what struck us, like the deer too terrified of the headlights or the horn to respond to the truck."
-- Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded, Cornell UP, 2003, p. 182. Emphasis added.
* Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962, p. 249.

It is nothing new to compare the computer/internet/hypertext to the print revolution, but doing so with both historical rigor and contemporary relevance is a great challenge [Note: Ralph Luker is still tirelessly finding new and interesting historians like Jay Gillette in cyberspace -- with an ocassional assist from myself -- which is why our blogroll keeps growing. It's been slightly reorganized, and comments and nominations are always welcome.].

As Rath's book makes very clear by separating the 15-16c print revolution from the 17-18c shift to primary visuality, print did not immediately overtake orality/aurality (I had to make that point today, talking about the role of literary satire serials in newspapers in early 20c China), any more than blogging has eliminated books or e-mail has made meetings irrelevant. Moreover, the"revolution" of Gutenberg was a regional one: Asia had a print culture that was several centuries old at that point, and rates of literacy that Europe wouldn't have until the 18th century (there's some backsliding in China in the 19c, though, which is why 20c China is playing catch-up); the Middle and Near East, on the other hand, remained firmly fixed on manuscript technology until nearly the 20th century and have had a relatively brief period of print culture before computer and broadcast technologies -- with very strong components of orality -- became widely available. [Note: both the other books under discussion could be cited here as well, Silva on print-oral interplay and Yorgason on the formation of regional cultures in tension. But that would take a great deal more of my time, and I've already read the books: now it's your turn.]

Though the pace of things may have changed it will take some time before the technology becomes habitual ("addictive" is not the same thing), and in that interim we are having some good discussions of what it all means. That self-awareness is one of the chief differences between this age and the previous ones. But we need to, particularly as historians, be wary of creating dividing lines that are really overlapping fields, and of narrating revolutionary moments that are really slow evolutionary processes.