Social Hardware

Via Slashdot, this Slate piece on internet book piracy. The basic premise is that as illicit page scans (such as those made of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix) or outright hoaxes (such as the “new” Naked Chef cookbook) promulgate, the publishing industry faces a crisis akin to what the music industry saw with MP3. Oddly, the Slate piece does not make the historical connection to earlier eras of book piracy, notably the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the practice was rampant (Dickens, to name just one popular author, was pirated relentlessly). What this history teaches us is that words have never been quite as fixed and authorially stable as we like to think; a contemporary reader picking up the latest Dickens could never be sure that what he or she held in their hand was what Boz really wrote. Book piracy has been explored most fully by Adrian Johns in his magisterial The Nature of the Book, where he argues, pace Elizabeth Eisenstein, that the trustworthtiness and reliability of the printed word is a relatively recent development, born of a concerted effort by the modern publishing industry and not print’s “natural” tendency toward stability and fixity. From this vantage point, the supposed post-structural fluidity of electronic text celebrated by many theorists is not a new phenomenon or a product of the medium’s radical new ontologies but rather an inherent aspect of what another critic, Jerome McGann, has called the textual condition.

All of this seems to me to resonate with the current discussion on blogging and ethics and rules for writing. Textual history teaches us that authors have been taking back their words for a long, long time (in the form of variants and revisions and new editions), and that “their” words, as we read them on the page, might or might not originate with the person named on the title sheet. In other words (so to speak), the textual critic knows that all writing is, of necessity, social. Authors write their books, but so too do their alter-egos (“Boz”), spouses, friends, editors, publishers, designers, critics, readers, and rip-off artists. Indeed, from this very climate sprang modern copyright law, at the center of so much discussion in the social software community. Social software itself, along with specific forms like blogs or wikis, would not be inherently strange to a reader in Dickens’s London . . . and the notion of an author taking back or not standing behind (or else standing alongside of) his or her words would just be in the nature of that familiar piece of social hardware, the book.