Scribes and Scribbles

Well, time for Part 3 in my 4 part series of lecture notes on the history of writing, prepared for my Writing for Online Media online class that I'm teaching this semester at Fordham University, the purpose of this overview being to put online writing into a larger historical, and media ecological context.  The first installment was posted as Orality and Online Writing, and the second as Reading, Writing, and Rearranging.  

And now for the third, I take a quick look at the materiality of writing and evolution of scribal culture.  So here we go class, it's time to begin.

Comments on the History of Writing 

Part III: Of Pages and Books 

The materials we use for writing also make a difference. One media ecology theorist, Harold Innis, distinguishes between heavy media, which are durable but difficult to transport, and light media which are perishable but easy to move from one place to another. Writing in stone can last for millennia, but you can get a hernia trying to carry it around. The Sumerians used clay tablets, which also were heavy and durable. The Egyptians developed a writing surface made from reeds, called papyrus, that was lightweight and easy to transport. 

Writing on clay tablets required a stylus to make impressions, and it was difficult to make elaborate characters in that way, so cuneiform is made up of relatively simple, geometric shapes. Writing on papyrus, the Egyptians used paint and brush, allowing for the elaborate characters we know as hieroglyphics. The materials we use influence the kinds of writing that we get. No one wrote a novel by chiseling onto a stone monument, at least as far as I know. 

Elaborate, decorative writing styles, such as calligraphy, makes for beautiful art objects, but slow down reading speed, and are not conducive to widespread literacy. The medieval illuminated manuscript is beautiful to look at, but hard to decipher. In China, where ideograms had an intrinsic pictorial quality, traditionally no distinction was made between poetry and painting, they were one unified art form. 

Aside from papyrus, parchment was also used in the ancient world. It was a stronger material, heavier and more durable than papyrus, made out of animal skin. That's why diplomas were known as a sheepskin, they were originally made from parchment. And then there is paper, lightweight like papyrus, originally made from linen, invented in China and eventually introduced to Europe (through innovations in linen manufacture, European use of paper coincided with the introduction of underwear). It wasn't until the late 19th century, due to a shortage of linen, that a method of making paper from wood pulp was adopted. 

Back in the ancient world, papyrus sheets were glued together, and rolled up as scrolls, held horizontally (not vertically as they often are depicted in cartoons). These were the first books, originating in Egypt, and eventually spreading to Greece via the Semitic traders from Phoenicia (modern day Lebanon), from whom the Greeks adopted the alphabet, calling it Phoenician writing, from which we get the term phonetic. And from the Phoenician town of Byblos, the Greeks derived their word for book (and we get bible, bibliography, etc.), which originally referred to a single scroll. Using scrolls, you could only move forward or back in a very linear fashion, it was difficult to move around from one part of the document to another, kind of like how with videocassettes we have to fast forward or rewind, and have no random access to scenes the way we do with DVDs. 

So scrolls were naturally limited in length, for very practical reasons, and, for example, the books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc., were literally separate books at one time, separate scrolls (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls). You also find that ancient Greek texts of some length were divided into Book I, Book II, etc., because they actually were written on more than one scroll. Later, when bound books were introduced, they became effectively chapters or sections of the volume, so that "book" came to mean both the physical volume and in this older sense, a part of the volume. And sometimes the old sense would be retrieved for stylistic reasons, so for example Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a single novel, but the publisher decided to publish it in 3 volumes, but it actually is subdivided into 6 "books" which are sections made up of several chapters each. So if you buy a copy of The Lord of the Rings in one volume, you have one book in the sense of a physical volume, made up of 3 books as they were originally published as separate volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King), but also divided into six sections that Tolkien called books, implying in his fictional history that they once existed as separate scrolls or volumes themselves, but those books really only exist as a stylistic subdivision. 

Scrolls could also be made of the more durable material of parchment, and it was during the Roman era that parchment pages were also bound together in the form of a codex, which was the first bound book, a new format that allowed for random access of individual pages. This new medium was adopted by the early Christian church, and became the basis of the medieval manuscript. As you may know, those manuscripts were quite large, heavy, bound in leather and sometimes metal as well. All documents had to be written by hand, and copied over and over again in various ways, sometimes via dictation. Mistakes were made, this was sometimes known as scribal corruption, but it is also true that scribes felt free to change the text as they saw fit, leave out parts they didn't like, add in whatever they wanted to, including incorporating comments others wrote in the margins. Even if just copying the text, no two copies would be exactly alike, and it was ok to create a new work that incorporated the work of older works. There was no sense of plagiarism or copyright, or of creating an entirely new, original work. Copies were generally made for personal use, or for the use of a small group. The making and selling of books was not a business. 

The invention of printing changed all that.

Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See

I want to ask you to help me correct an inaccuracy out here on the net, an inaccuracy that amounts to an injustice.  Here’s the story:

Neil Postman wrote, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”  This is the first sentence that opens his book, The Disappearance of Childhood, which was originally published in 1982 by Delacorte Press.

 

I can remember being a young doctoral student in the old media ecology program at NYU, I was just 22 when I started there in 1980, and seeing Neil writing the book with a black felt tip pen on yellow legal pads.

Neil Postman wrote “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” as the first sentence of the Introduction to that book, appearing on p. xi.  Here, take a look:

 The Disappearance of Childhood  was the second of Postman's major works providing a critical analysis of television's influence on culture.  It was preceded by Teaching as a Conserving Activity, and followed by Amusing Ourselves to Death.  And if you find Postman's media ecology scholarship at all interesting and valuable, and especially if you've read Amusing Ourselves to Death and you haven't read The Disappearance of Childhood, then you will find The Disappearance of Childhood to be a delightful companion piece, a well-crafted extended essay, and important work of cultural criticism.

Postman begins by writing that “children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” because he was writing about communication, which involves the sending of messages through a channel to a receiver.  In the case of messages sent to the future, the receiver may be unknown to us, but the basic idea still applies.  This view originates in the post-war era with the Shannon-Weaver Model:

 The Shannon-Weaver Model was modified by communication theorist David Berlo circa 1960:

But the important point is that Postman was writing about communication, and thinking about children, and childhood, in terms of communication.  The idea that children are our legacy, a way of projecting something of ourselves into the future, is a time-honored, traditional notion.  But thinking of children as messages, as part of the process of  communication, is a relatively new orientation.  

And as any good media ecology scholar knows, in 1964 Marshall McLuhan declared that "the medium is the message," by which he meant (among other things) that the messages we send are influenced in significant ways by the medium that we use to create and send them   And The Disappearance of Childhood is all about how children as messages are influenced by the media that they use, and that we use to prepare our children to carry on for us in the future.  And it is about how childhood is a message that is influenced by the medium that we use to create it. 

Yes, create it, because childhood is a cultural construct (albeit one based on an underlying biological reality), a message we send to ourselves about biological and social reproduction.  In print culture, children came to be seen as special and innocent, and in need of extended protection as they were cloistered away in schools, while television culture has returned us in some ways to a view of childhood that does not allow for much distinction between children and adults, hence the title The Disappearance of Childhood (which also signals the disappearance of adulthood).

But you really have to read the book to get Postman's argument.  And I only provide this cursory summary to underline the fact that Postman's quote, “children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” with its particular emphasis on children and communication, originated out of a very specific set of circumstances, and its meaning is quite clear in that context.  But it also has a wonderfully poetic quality, evocative and compelling, and works quite well standing alone.  Some might even be fooled into thinking it is some kind of ancient proverb, despite its clearly contemporary sensibility.

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” is Neil Postman's most famous quote.  So what's the problem, you might ask?  And I'm glad you did.  The problem is that when you Google the quote nowadays, you get something like this:

How did this come to be, you might ask?  And I'm glad you did.  You see, this John W. Whitehead wrote a book entitled, ironically enough, The Stealing of America.

And this book was published in 1983, a year after The Disappearance of Childhood.  Just to be clear, here's the copyright page from Whitehead's book:

And here's the copyright page from Postman's book:

And just to dispel any lingering doubts, here is p. 68 of Whitehead's book, where he specifically cites Postman:

The Disappearance of Childhood also is included in the list of references that appear at the end of the book.  

So, are you ready now?  Ok, here is how Postman's quote appears in Whitehead's book, starting on the bottom of p. 116 and continuing on to p. 117:

Ah ha, you may be saying!  Caught red-handed! Well, the problem is that the circles that Whitehead travels in, and the readership that he picks up, is quite different from those associated with Postman.  So who knew?  It would have been quite the coincidence to come across it back in the 80s, or even the 90s.  But, the quote being so poetic and memorable, it got picked up from Whitehead's book, and reproduced all over the place with the wrong attribution.  It appears in some baby book, which probably amplified the error significantly.

Who is this guy, anyway, you might ask?  Well, you can read about him on this page from the Rutherford Institute website:  About John W. Whitehead.   And you can read about the Rutherford Institute on their Wikipedia entry:  Rutherford Institute.  

Not that it matters much.  I am writing this, and asking for your help, not to cast blame or level accusations.  Postman was certainly the easygoing, forgiving sort of person who would not have made a big issue out of this.  But speaking for those of us who honor his memory, and who believe in credit where credit is due, we would like to set the record straight.

The problem is that it is very hard to set the record straight on the web.  It is very hard to get the content of websites changed.  You can send a message, but it may be that the site is no longer active, or no longer actively supervised, or it may be that the individuals associated with the site just don't want to be bothered, or just don't care.  Believe me, attempts have been made, and met with no success.

But, the main thing to do when dealing with problems like this is to accentuate the positive (see my previous post, Digital Damage Control).  So, I am asking you to help to get the word out on the web, anyway that you can.

 Please feel free to repost all or part of this entry on your own blog or site or elsewhere on the web.  Or write your own post about this situation, using any part of this post that you care to, it is entirely open and available for copying and revising.

If you do post this or a similar message anywhere else, let me know, and I will add an acknowledgment and link at the end of this post.

And/or, please link to this post.

And/or, spread the word and the link via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  If you tweet, Neil Postman wrote, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see,” that will be less than 50 characters, so you can add, please retweet, include a link to this post or another one, and/or note that we want to remedy an injustice.

 I ask that you please help me to get this particular message out there, get more positive posts and listings out there, and at least we can start to set the record straight.

Neil Postman did not live to see this time of Google and social media, but today, March 8th, 2011, is the 80th anniversary of his birth, and if he were still with us, he would joke about how what we are doing here is launching Operation Childhood, and probably ask if there wasn't some better way for us to spend our time, like reading a good book.  But deep down, he would be very much appreciative of the messages that we now can send on his behalf.  

So I ask you to be a living message now, and for the future.

Links to Posts:

This Small Favor I Ask of You on Andrew Postman's DayRiffer Site

Guest blog: Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See on John McDaid's Hard Deadllines Blog

Vincent W. Hevern, SJ, Ph.D. Homepage (quote and link at the bottom)

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see reposted on the student blog for my Social Media class at Fordham University (which the students named, not me)

"Operation Childhood" in honor of Neil Postman posted on Mary Rothschild's Healthy Media Choices website

Happy 80th Birthday, Neil Postman posted on Peter Fallon's In the Dark blog

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see reposted on the student blog for my graduate class on Understanding New Media at Fairleigh Dickinson University (which, again, the students named, not me)

Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See partially reposted on Laureano Ralon's Figure/Ground website

Neil Postman: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see" posted with great humor on Bob Blechman's Model Media Ecologist blog

CHILDREN ARE THE LIVING MESSAGES WE SEND TO A TIME WE WILL NOT SEE posted on David Zweig's memyselfandhim blog

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see posted on Tumblr by secondguessmedia (also David Zweig I believe)

Quotations about Children in The Quote Garden website

Properly attributed caption on a beautiful photograph by Irena Mila on flickr

The Foundation for Scotland School for Veterans' Children website

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see image of first page of the Introduction from The Disappearance of Childhood posted on Tumblr by Austin Kleon (via Matt Thomas)

Properly attributed caption on a beautiful photograph by Irena Mila on flickriver

Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See (Neil Postman, 1982) posted on the Technología y Sociedad blog of Fernando Gutiérrez

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." ~Neil Postman quoted on Heather's Little Wonders blog 

Quoted on an attractive letterpress card being sold by letterary press on the Artfire website

Quoted on an attractive letterpress card being sold by letterary press on the Etsy website

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. posted on Tumblr by Supprosetry

80th Anniversary of Neil Postman’s Birth posted on the McLuhan Galaxy blog by Alex Kuskis

Guest blog: Children are the Living Messages We Send to a Time We Will Not See listing of the post from John McDaid's Hard Deadlines on the fwix website

Neil Postman: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see" post by Bob Blechman on open salon

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." Neil Postman tweet by Bill Gross

Quotation appearing on The Nanny Collection website 

Quote appearing on Irena Mila's page on the Lurvely website 

Included in a list of quotes on Yahoo Answers 

Quote appearing in a Flak Magazine article by Angela Penny 

Quote appearing on the Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children website 

Quote appearing on the Taximom website 

Under 25 and Rebuilding Communities Using Social Media (SXSW) on the Plancast website

Series of tweets listed on the Topsy website

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” —Neil Postman posted by the DavenportIowaNews on Friendfeed via Matt Thomas

9 Things Having a Baby Taught Me About Personal Finance blog post by Wojo Kulicki on the lendingtree blog, quote appears at the end of the post

Included in Inspiring Quotes for Us All on The Quotations Page

Teaching Excellence: Mary Pat Fallon, Dominican GSLIS speech posted on the Tame the Web site

October is Children’s Month post on the Definitely Filipino blog 

Quote used as a caption for a stunning photograph posted by Bren Parks on the Mystic's Muse blog

Quote used as a caption for a lovely photograph posted by Cassandra Clifford on the Children:  The World Affairs blog

False attribution corrected in comment on the English-Test.net site

Quote used as a caption for a cute photograph by Mystic Pekoe on flickr

Included on Relationship Quotes page of BeHappy! website 

Neil Postman entry on WorldLingo wiki

Quote used as a caption for a cool photograph by Malin Longva on Flickriver

Neil Postman Essay Topic – Technology and Its Impact on Human Life on unipapers term paper mill website

Encyclopedia Down!

So, when I was a kid, my dad bought a second hand Encyclopedia Britannica, I think it was actually from the 1920s, but hey it was something. Back then, they said that if you didn't have an encyclopedia, your kids wouldn't do well in school--I remember my sixth grade teacher once came to our house, he was selling encyclopedias door-to-door. And it was the old fear appeal, well known to students of persuasion, more recently used to get parents to buy home computers and internet connections. Most of my friends had new editions of the World Book, but anyway there always was the library, where you could find all of the encyclopedias.

Back in the nineties, I wrote entries on "mass media" and "communication" for Groliers, and updated them for their new multimedia edition on CD-ROM, which was also available online. So, I had some inkling that things were in flux, and that encyclopedia were moving over into new media. But then came Wikipedia, and even the changes that were going on changed. And this all came up in an article published last Sunday in the New York Times, Week in Review section, p. 3. The piece was written by Noam Cohen, and entitled "Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias," and it starts like this:

IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.

A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print.

Back in the 1990s, Encyclopaedia Britannica led the pack in coming to terms with the idea that the public no longer viewed ownership of the multivolume compendium of information as a ticket to be punched on the way to the upper middle class — or at least as the oracle of first resort for copying a book report.

Sales of Britannica’s 32 volumes peaked in 1990, but in the next six years, they dropped 60 percent, and the company moved quickly to reinvent itself online. In 1996, Britannica eliminated its legendary staff of 1,000 door-to-door salesmen, already down from a high of 2,000 in the 1970s, in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia for home computers.

Jorge Aguilar-Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a private company based in Chicago, said that the print edition was still profitable, but that sales were just 10 percent of what they were in 1990. Customers are mostly schools and libraries.

It was only last month, however, that the publisher of Germany’s foremost multivolume encyclopedia, Brockhaus, took similar action, announcing that in April it would be putting online, free, all 300,000 of its articles, vetted by scholars over 200 years of print editions. (Brockhaus hopes to make money by selling ads on its site.) At the same time, the publishing house said it couldn’t promise that it would ever produce another print edition, something it has done regularly since the encyclopedia appeared in Leipzig in 1808.

Publishers in Denmark and France, too, are rethinking the commercial viability of their encyclopedias. A one-volume French encyclopedia, Quid, lost its publisher last month, and may only survive online. The largest publisher in Denmark, Gyldendal, has decided that the subscription plan for its online encyclopedia is misguided (it stopped a print edition in 2006). It plans to come up with another way to support itself.

“There is some kind of sadness,” said Nicole Weiffen-Aumann, a spokeswoman for Brockhaus, “but on the other side, many people are happy, looking forward to our new product — both things you can find in our company.” She added: “There are many people that say, ‘When I was very young I bought my first encyclopedia from Brockhaus, and there will be no next edition, I can’t believe it.’ ”

The Encyclopedia Americana still has good sales in print volumes, said Greg Worrell, president of Scholastic Classroom and Library Group, but the company is focusing on its online outlets. He said it was still determining a print plan, but added, “the likelihood is there will not be the 2009 multivolume print version.”

And it is funny, because encyclopedias were always a mixed bag, generally not respected from a scholarly perspective, seen as an easy alternative to real research, okay for grade school, but not for serious work in higher education. In a sense, they were a precursor of the digest format, which came to the fore in the early 20th century, and was criticized for its simplifications, its dumbing down of information, by critics such as Daniel Boorstin, for instance. But now comes the nostalgia:

To scholars, the ready access to updated information online is a net gain for the public. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t mourn the passing of a household icon — a set of knowledge-packed books on their own reserved shelves that even parents had to defer to.

“I remember in my own childhood in the 1940s, early ’50s, I and my parents would sit around the table and look at the encyclopedia together,” said Larry Hickman, director of a center at Southern Illinois University devoted to the education pioneer John Dewey. “In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Book encyclopedia was regarded as authoritative,” he recalled, laughing as he agreed, “That’s why you would copy it for your book report.”

And you know, there's an interesting point here that was completely bypassed in the article. It used to be fairly common practice for grade school kids to copy out of the encyclopedia, maybe with some slight changes. No one got all bent out of shape about plagiarism back then. Maybe it was thought that the simple act of copying by hand was enough of a conscious effort to allow the knowledge to be absorbed, making it a real learning experience. Interesting to think about that, the residue of scribal culture, schoolroom copying, the tactile and kinetic learning involved, an intimate means of thinking with the author. But now we live in the age of digital copy and paste commands that totally undermine the notion of copyright, and everyone is concerned about plagiarism down to the elementary school level--this came up in my son's school a couple of years ago, for example. But I digress. Back to Noam:

But Mr. Hickman said that parents and children can have the same discussions “seated in front of the computer, the electronic hearth, as I like to call it.” And he said that losing a set of books considered infallible was actually a good thing for developing critical thinking.

Yet, as encyclopedia publishers struggle, the Internet age has become a golden one for the newer kind of encyclopedia.

An ambitious project to catalog online all known species on earth — with the even-more-ambitious title the Encyclopedia of Life — went live last month. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a project that began online in 1995 and has never been in print and never will be, is chugging along with nearly 1,000 entries that are vetted by an academic board of more that 100 scholars for a total of 10 million words.

Now, enter the two ton gorilla in the room, or was that an elephant?:

And then there is the behemoth Wikipedia, a project that has no board to vet articles and is created by thousands of volunteers, with more than two million articles in English and an additional five million in a babel of other languages.

Wikipedia is regularly among the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet throughout the world — maybe in part because there’s a lot more there than meets the needs of the average term paper. The superabundance of less-than-prized information on the site has led to a phenomenon called “wiki-groaning,” which involves comparing the length of seemingly disparate articles to humorous effect. Lightsaber Combat beats out Modern Warfare, for example, and John Locke, the character from the TV show “Lost,” edges out the other John Locke, whoever he was.

Encyclopedia publishers, while taking swipes at Wikipedia’s unreliability since it can be edited by anyone, have clearly adopted some of its lessons. They are incorporating more photographs and suggestions from readers to improve online content, and they are committed to updating material as facts change.

Britannica says it updates an article every 20 minutes. Even the Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia will make changes with relative speed. When a law was passed on voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, “our entry was updated within a couple of weeks, at the latest,” said Edward N. Zalta, a senior research scholar at Stanford and principal editor of the online encyclopedia. “It may have been a day or two — we don’t do it as quickly as Wikipedia, but in a timely way.”

This is the problem, raised time and time again, speed of dissemination become paramount, rather than taking time for evaluation. Editing, gatekeeping, is a process that slows down the flow of information, and the new media are all about instantaneous dissemination. It's been noted that Wikipedia has some things in common with online news sources, and has news stories covered by new or amended entries almost as quickly as the journalists. And hand-in-hand with speed goes a massive increase in the volume of information being made available. Here's a revealing graphic that accompanied the article:


Now, back to Noam one last time:

In essence, the Internet is justifying the hubris of early compilers like Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, said Edward O. Wilson, the expert on insects at Harvard who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and serves as honorary chairman. “There were so few species to deal with, only in the thousands,” he said. “He and his disciples thought they could do the rest of the flora and fauna of the world. Boy, were they wrong.”

In the intervening centuries, Professor Wilson said, science was taken over by specialists. But by allowing specialists to pool their knowledge on a Web site, he said, the Encyclopedia of Life will be able to come close to the dream of a compendium of all the known species in the world.

“Once we get all the information in one place, think of the impact this will have — available to anybody, anywhere, anytime,” he said.

Asked about his own experience with encyclopedias, Professor Wilson said, “I grew up in Alabama — we didn’t have things like the Encyclopaedia Britannica in our home.” What he did have were field guides. “All the field guides — for snakes, butterflies, turtles. Back in the 40s, I had my butterfly nets, and I was right up to date through my guides,” Professor Wilson said.

He added: “There are nerds that say we will have something the size of a field guide, and punch in something. Maybe I am hopelessly old fashioned, but a kid with a knapsack, and a Boy Scout or Girl Scout manual, printed, a field guide on snakes or butterflies, printed, is the best combination in the world.”

Mr. Aguilar-Cauz of Britannica is counting on that sort of nostalgic allure to keep at least some encyclopedias on bookshelves and not just hard drives. He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs — similar to the way some audiophiles still swear by vinyl LPs and turntables. “What you need people to understand,” he said, “is that it is a luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.”

The print encyclopedia as a luxury item! This corresponds to Marshall McLuhan's insight that a medium that becomes obsolescent does not disappear, but rather is transformed into an art form.

Funny thing is, encyclopedias were the product of print culture. At the dawn of the age of typography, you had what was known as the Renaissance Man, the individual who might conceivably know all that there is to know (doubtful actually, but maybe a good chunk of it). Why Renaissance? Yes, it was the rebirth of learning, but it was also immediately followed by the printing press creating a knowledge explosion, so many books, so much knowledge, made so widely available, leading to more people studying more and more, studying books but also the world, discovering more and more new knowledge, so that it soon became impossible for any one individual to know everything. So, the Renaissance Man represented the last period of history where someone could make a legitimate claim to have mastered all knowledge. And with printing came the era of the specialist.

But what also appeared in Gutenberg's wake was the dream of trying to collect all the knowledge of the world within a book or set of books, rather than within a brain. One of the earliest efforts came from the French Encyclopédistes (note that I'm giving you the link to Wikipedia there), spearheaded by Denis Diderot (wikipedia link, again). And what's fascinating is that the effort was an abysmal failure. Print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein noted that by this time, the knowledge explosion has simply become too massive. When I first read about it, I was a bit surprised, since the encyclopedias we used as kids never gave the impression of being failures. But in fact, they are the products of lowered expectations, presenting not all the knowledge of the world--all our knowledge encircled, en-cyclopsed--but just a summary, a digest, of selected subjects.

And finally, this brings me to a poem I posted over on my MySpace poetry blog two weeks ago, which being altogether relevant to this subject, I will now repost here.

Note: For anyone unfamiliar with the language, the final consonants of French names and words are typically silent, so the name Diderot is pronounced dee der 'oh

Digital Diderot

or

The March of the Wikipedians

Hey diddle, Diderot,
How much do you know?
Are you nimble?
Are you quick?
Jacking up that candlestick?
Can you light up that wick?

Dites-moi, Monsieur
Diderot! Diderot! Diderot!
Did you do the math?
If so, then what did you
Figure-0! Figure-0! Figure-010101!
Burning the midnight 0i1?
Flickering illumination?
Wavering dedication?
Abée c'est Diderot?
To what order do you belong?
Was it all a Cartesian dream?
Or a coordinated nightmare?

Well...
Let's all go down to the Wiki-Mart!
To get us some of that Kwiki-Smart!
Then enter the Enchanted Wiki-Room!
"Where all the birds sing words and the flowers croon!"

Hickory Diderot dock!
The mouse clicked on the clock!
While the cat played the fiddle,
And Alexandria's ragtime bandits
Set fire to stacks and shelves,
Knowledge cooked but not consumed...
No matter...
It's all immaterial...
And the cyclops turned into a sysops!
And a multivolume set became the internet!
And they put the pedia to the media!
Wicked! Wicked! Wicked!

Diderot, row, row your boat
Gently down bitstream...
Adieu Monsieur Diderot, adieu mon ami...
The gods have left the machine!

And so you see, I already had my eulogy for print encyclopedias written! Isn't that something!

On Plagiarism

So, I've been meaning to put up a post about this topic, and finally, finally, I'm getting around to it. The world can rest easy now.

Plagiarism. That's at topic on everybody's mind these days. Or maybe not. But it comes up a lot in academia, especially when it comes to students. I have a certain aptitude for spotting it in student papers, not that I'm perfect--I suspect I occasionally may let one get by me--but I'm pretty good. Just recently, I had a graduate paper that included an entire Wikipedia entry, incorporated into the paper seemingly seamlessly. Now that's depressing, but I've also seen those Amazon customer reviews of books incorporated into papers, and that's just awful.

But probably the worst instance was a few years ago, an undergraduate paper taken completely off of the internet. Now, that's not what stands out, it was the students response when I told him he was getting an F in the class for plagiarizing the term paper. He said to me that he hadn't committed the plagiarism, it was the guy he hired to write the paper for him!!!

Of course, plagiarism comes up with professors, scholars, intellectuals, and professional writers as well, sometimes due to intentional copying, sometimes accidentally (or so they claim). It seems that word processing facilitates accidental plagiarism, as files can be shifted and reformatted, and the citation gets lost, and the writer forgets that someone else wrote those words (I find that hard to accept, but then again, other people's memories may work differently than mine). I've seen this come up occasionally with people I know.

It also comes up through the media, with journalists for example, occasionally turning out to have copied a report or feature from somewhere else. And in politics, Joe Biden was knocked out of the Democratic primaries in 1988 by because of his plagiarism. That was a little strange, because plagiarism is not so much of an issue in public speaking, with its strong roots in oral tradition, than in publishing, but it turned out that he also plagiarized while a law student. Too bad, because Biden was and is otherwise an outstanding candidate.

Electronic text, and the internet in particular, have made plagiarism extraordinarily easy, because all it requites is a copy and paste, plus substituting your own name for the author. I have a book chapter coming out this year (hopefully) where I argue that cut, copy, and paste are the three most basic tools defining the digital age.

On MySpace, I've seen plagiarism come up a number of times among the little community of poets that I've joined. What follows are expressions of outrage, and a kind of circling of the wagons, as many different writers point their finger at the culprit. A public shaming is the main punishment. Sometimes the reaction seems a little extreme to me, as there really is not very much at stake, certainly no money, no fame, but it is true that this sort of writing comes from the very core, so its theft might seem all the more hurtful, and insulting, for that reason. Writing in general seems to retain a link to our sense of self. I've noticed that students get more upset about bad grades on their papers than on exams, regardless of how much either counts towards the final grade.

There are some people who don't care about being plagiarized, but I've also seen some people, whose writing I can't imagine anyone wanting to steal. getting all bent out of shape over the possibility of someone plagiarizing their work, whether they should copyright it somehow before posting and all. My understanding is that what we put out there is a gift, as my colleague in London, Richard Barbrook has argued, and we are paid back by the status that gift grants us. It's a lot like tribal culture all over again, aka secondary orality and the global village.

In the end, there's not much anyone can do to stop plagiarism from happening (although there are remedies once it's happened). There's been quite a bit written about copyright law in recent years, but all the agonizing simply underscores the fact that the very notion of copyright has been undermined by the electronic media, not just computers and the internet, but radio, TV, and audio recordings. This is just one of the ways in which the electronic media are reversing the biases of print culture.

Media ecologists have long pointed to the fact that copyright laws were introduced as a reaction to printing technology, a way to protect printers and publishers as an industry. Along with copyright, the concept of originality is a product of print culture. Before print, the ideal of writing something completely novel just did not exist. There was no anxiety of influence, and no guilt about copying someone else's words, just as my students feel no guilt, not do I feel any anger, when they copy my words into their notebooks during class.

So, anyway, I kind of tried to tie all of these related threads together in a poem I wrote and posted on my MySpace poetry blog, and I thought I'd bring that up in this blog, since the topic is relevant. So, I'm going to paste the poem in below for quick and easy reference. In fact, I'm going to copy the html code for the entire blog entry and paste it in here, good old copy and paste:

A Page

From the

Fordham University

Student Handbook:

and now this:

Our Plague Days

A plague! A plague!
Of plagiarism!
A pox upon our house!
A noxious pox of chicken scratch!
A literary apocalypse!
Fifth horseman riding roughshod over fourth estate!
Trespassers on intellectual property!
Transgressors eschewing all decency!
With your insincerest form of flattery!
And your crimes of dispassion!
Dispatched with dishonesty!
Prosper not, base cheats and ne'er-do-wells!
Stealing sentences!
Robbing phrases!
Purloining expression!
With such contemptuous disease!
Thieves in the digital night!
With your evil tools of cut and paste!
Word-burglars with your copywrongs!
Absconding scoundrels!
You are our affliction!
Outcast dispel this foul air of derivation!
This contagion that eschews all quotation!
Vile pestilence that you are!
I wish you Damnation!

But hold!
These lines came to me in a fever!
But now a chill attacks my spine!
Are these words that I have penned truly mine?
Or did I stumble 'pon them in some grave tome?
Digging about late one night in times long passed away?
Now half-remembered, now half-dismembered?
Be it ale or ailment, might I be under the influence?
O, the anxiety! Sweet muse, grant me certainty!

Aha! I have it! To insure that nothing unoriginal issues forth from my mouth or hand, I shall henceforth communicate in a language entirely of my own devising, known only to me!

Z okzftd! Z okzftd!
Ne okzfhzqhrl!
Z onw tonm ntq gntrd!
Z mnwhntr onw ne bghbjdm rbqzsbg!
Z khsdqzqx zonbzkxord!
Ehesg gnqrdlzm qhchmf qntfgrgnc nudq entqsg drszsd!
Sqdrozrrdqr nm hmsdkkdbstzk oqnodqsx!
Sqzmrfqdrrnqr drbgdvhmf zkk cdbdmbx!
Vhsg xntq hmrhmbdqdrs enql ne ekzssdqx!
Zmc xntq bqhldr ne chrozrrhnm!
Chrozsbgdc vhsg chrgnmdrsx!
Oqnrodq mns, azrd bgdzsr zmc md'dq-cn-vdkkr!
Rsdzkhmf rdmsdmbdr!
Qnaahmf ogqzrdr!
Otqknhmhmf dwoqdrrhnm!
Vhsg rtbg bnmsdlostntr chrdzrd!
Sghdudr hm sgd chfhszk mhfgs!
Vhsg xntq duhk snnkr ne bts zmc ozrsd!
Vnqc-atqfkzqr vhsg xntq bnoxvqnmfr!
Zarbnmchmf rbntmcqdkr!
Xnt zqd ntq zeekhbshnm!
Ntsbzrs chrodk sghr entk zhq ne cdqhuzshnm!
Sghr bnmszfhnm sgzs drbgdvr zkk ptnszshnm!
Uhkd odrshkdmbd sgzs xnt zqd!
H vhrg xnt Czlmzshnm!

Ats gnkc!
Tgdrd khmdr bzld sn ld hm z edudq!
Ats mnv z bghkk zsszbjr lx rohmd!
Zqd sgdrd vnqcr sgzs h gzud odmmdc sqtkx lhmd?
Nq chc H rstlakd 'onm sgdl hm rnld fqzud snld?
Chffhmf zants kzsd nmd mhfgs hm shldr knmf ozrrdc zvzx?
Mnv gzke-qdldladqdc, mnv gzke-chrldladqdc?
Ad hs zkd nq zhkldms, lhfgs H ad tmcdq sgd hmektdmbd?
N, sgd zmwhdsx! Rvdds ltrd, fqzms ld bdqszhmsx!

Zgz! H gzud hs! Sn hmrtqd sgzs mnsghmf tmnqhfhmzk hrrtdr enqsg eqnl lx lntsg nq gzmc, H rgzkk gdmbdenqsg bnlltmhbzsd hm z kzmftzfd dmshqdkx ne lx nvm cduhrhmf, jmnvm nmkx sn ld!

That last banner is for real. If you want to do me a solid, you can click there, register (name and password), and vote for me by giving me the maximum number of stars, natch.

Anyway, you can also see that same poem in its original setting (and colors) by clicking on the link I am providing here: Our Plague Days. Why should you bother, you may ask, and well you should, when I already gave you the poem right here? Well, because if you go to the other site, you can read all of the comments people left, and my own replies. Some are funny, some get into the media ecological notions I brought up earlier. The comments also provide some indication of how different people read things differently. I think they're really interesting, but that's just me.

But there's more that I want to relate. One of my MySpace friends, who also has a poetry blog, published a poem that he dedicated to me, after reading Our Plague Days. The poet's name is Moses Roth, he's from Israel, and he goes by the handle of "Moses the One and Only (aka Moses the Holy Dude)" on MySpace. Over in Israel, I assume he is known as Moshe. Here's his picture:




So, since this was a poem he wrote for me, and as I've stated in the past, this blog is an exercise in narcissism, I am going to provide you with the link so you can go take a look at what he wrote (for me) and posted. Oh, and to avoid confusion, he refers to me as Lazerleh, because my Jewish name is Lazar (these are names that are used for religious ritual purposes, if you don't have a biblical name like Benjamin or Sarah), and the ending is a diminutive. In turn, I refer to him as Moshe, Mosheleh, Moisheleh, Moisheh, or Moi. Anyway, here's the link to his poem: Spa(w)n.

Pretty cool, huh? I thought so. Thank you again, Moishie!

So, his post links back to mine, and in turn, to show my appreciation, I added another post which linked back to his: Spa(w)n by Moses the One and Only (aka Moses the Holy Dude.

Being the astute reader that you are, I don't have to tell you that this post now adds another link to the chain. Isn't the web wonderful, and blogging just grand? I guess that instead of saying that it's not copying if you use quotation marks, we now say that it's not copying if we provide hot links. That's progress for you!