The Wild Ones

Happy birthday to Vickie Charabati, Stacey, John Updike, Ariana, Dale Randall, and countless other prodigiously creative people. The stars were well-aligned for this date, and all of the above have made the transition from the analog age to digital: they are plugged in and on the march. Go, go, go!

Ebooks are spreading fast because once a text is digitized, it can be made available for free or for a small download fee overnight, or almost instantly. Access is global. The snail trail of traditional publishing will not be able to keep up with the pace. Remember papyrus? Fountain pens? Manual typewriters? Carbon copies? Mimeographs? Publishing seasons? It's time we all get on the clue train and make good use of new opportunities. From inside the traditional ivory towers of academia and other highly politicized and often petty-minded bureaucratic entities, it must feel like the wild ones are at the gates. Let the drones shake in their office spaces and committee meetings -- the global revolution is at hand. And this revolution will be blogged. I have no doubt that, if they lived in today's world, Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, even Karl Marx would be highly amused and plugged in to the internet.

This is not to say we must embrace technological changes without thoughtful contemplation, nor underestimate a certain sadness at the passing of some of the more charming lifestyles of the past. Personally, I miss the clank of old typewriters and the skips and scratches of vinyl records. I still occasionally use the fountain pen and compose letters and doodles on paper, and I will always prefer real people to automated systems. There are scary glitches in the online world that will probably always be with us. We are more dependent on crackling electricity and new programming, and must remain vigilant to abuses and errors.

(In fact, I experienced a glitch recently that, had it gone undetected, would have put me out $600. Scarily, I noticed on my online banking account that another bank had cashed my rent check once on a Friday and then -- the exact same check -- again on the following Monday. When I called this in immediately, a person at my bank announced that she would "have to run a vector" to figure out what happened. Today, I met with a real person, Tricia Cassar, who very pleasantly corrected the human error. We were both enriched by the experience for having interacted in person, but the moral of the story is -- religiously check for errors).

There are numerous problems with the digital world, awful things that my father refers to as "CYBER." The electric grid falters from time to time; hackers and viruses and human blunders and mysterious comings and goings all play a part and always will. We'll just have to live with them, protecting our personal boundaries as best we can. There are also frustrations and violations of personal space pointed out in Lynne Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door (Gotham Books, 2005), a wry look at ways people abuse cellphones and automated systems.

Still, as a librarian, it seems to me that the best features of the digital revolution include always-improving access and storage capabilities, in which the internet is proving far superior to the paper and books world. The Library of Congress and other traditional repositories simply can't keep up, and besides, they are physically vulerable to destruction or decay. Katrina wiped out scores of libraries, bookstores, and archives, but anything digitized and stored somewhere on the internet or world wide web can usually be salvaged intact. The original Alexandria Library was burned to the ground with practically everything in it lost -- a cultural tragedy. The internet has the growing capacity to make available to all the greatest library the world has ever known. Huge virtual reference endeavors like www.wikipedia.org contribute to the holistic and participatory process of creating a stunningly useful universal reference "space." And a plethora of freely available translation programs will increasingly promote cross-cultural communications.

We've traditionally treated texts like books as finished products, things as palpable and as hard to change as petrified wood. Now authors have the option to create living texts, writing and editing things that can remain in process for as long as they live. Even if no major changes are rendered, they can go back and fix typos or tweak things whenever they wish. Given the general lack of editing at publishing houses these days, that's a handy capability.

Blogs and websites provide excellent formats for living multimedia texts, allowing hyperlinks, clarifications and changes. The blog can promote active dialogue between author and reader, and readers can contribute their own comments and suggestions. As for this blog, today it has crossed the 1,000 "views" threshold. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it does seem to indicate that it's reaching a growing audience. Thanks for reading and please do make comments or suggestions if you feel like it, including pointing out technical mistakes, etc. I always appreciate input.

There's much more in the hopper (there always is), but ciao for now.