bookmobility

Recently in the course I’m teaching, we discussed Greg Downey’s “The Librarian and the Univac: Automation and Labor at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.” It’s an excellent piece about the politics of labor and technology at LIBRARY 21, an exhibit organized collaboratively by the American Library Association and—wait for it—the United States Air Force. In addition to more traditional (though often tech-packed) spaces like Children’s World and a teen-focused Learning Resource Center, the exhibit featured a UNIVAC computer programmed to spit out quotations from famous books, reference lists targeted to specific demographic cross-sections, and other (dubiously useful) information. 

While searching for material to teach alongside the article, I came across this story of a scrapbook discovered then deconstructed. The book recorded one family’s road trip through the Pacific Northwest in 1962, including a stop at the World’s Fair. The person who discovered the scrapbook sold some of the material but passed on other bits to various people and institutions. Imagine my delight when it turns out that not only is some of the material from the scrapbook from LIBRARY 21 but that it was donated to the American Library Association Archives, located right here at the University of Illinois. (My students will be using the ALA archives for their research project, so this was an opportunity to discuss not only the sources but questions of their provenance and the ways archives organize and make them available.)

My favorite of the LIBRARY 21 documents—all print-outs from the UNIVAC, the others provide information about specific countries—is the one picture above, which adds even more layers to Downey’s argument about the problem of supposedly labor-saving technologies (hint: they really do no such thing). Titled “THE COMPUTER……..ELECTRONIC SERVANT TO MANKIND,” the print-out reads:

IN THIS EXHIBIT YOU HAVE SEEN HOW A SALE RECORDED ON A CASH REGISTER WILL FLOW THROUGH AN ELECTRONIC SYSTEM IN WHICH MACHINES READ HUMAN-LANGUAGE PRINTING AND IN WHICH MACHINES TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. THESE SAME PRINCIPLES ARE BEING APPLIED TO EVERY LINE OF BUSINESS, SCIENNCE, AND GOVERNMENT TO HANDLE THE WORLDS MOUNTAINS OF PAPERWORK.

THE COMPUTERS OF TODAY ARE OFF-SPRING OF SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF ELECTRONIC-ANCESTORS. BY THE TIME THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ROLLS AROUND, THEY WILL HAVE CHANGED IN APPEARANCE AND DESIGN TO A POINT WHERE THEY WILL BEAR LITTLE RESEMBLANCE TO THEIR PRESENT DAY COUNTERPARTS.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT TODAY’S COMPUTERS ARE NOT PRACTICAL…NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. IF IT WERE NOT FOR THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS, MAN WOULD NOT BE MAKING TODAYS TREMENDOUS ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, MEDICINE, EDUCATION, TRANSPORTATION, PRODUCTION, MARKETING, AND DATA PROCESSING.

OPERATING AT SPEEDS WHICH STAGGER THE IMAGINATION, COMPUTERS SOLVE PROBLEMS THAT WOULD TAKE MANY YEARS TO SOLVE…THEY ENABLE PEOPLE IN MANAGEMENT TO OBTAIN FACTS ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS IN TIME TO BE USED MOST EFFECTIVELY…THEY TAKE THE DRUDGERY OUT OF RECORD-KEEPING…THEY ELEVATE THE ROLES OF PEOPLE IN BUSINESS TO A PLACE WHERE EMPLOYEES CAN CONTRIBUTE MORE OF THEIR TALENTS TO THEIR INDIVIDUAL JOBS…THEY HANDLE THE REAMS OF PAPERWORK THAT FLOW THROUGH THE WORLDS BUSINESS HOUSES…THEY HELP THE SCIENTISTS DESIGN NEW AND BETTER PRODUCTS…THEY SERVE AS VALUABLE TOOLS IN DEFENSE, SPACE, AND MILITARY ENDEAVORS.

IN SHORT, THE COMPUTER IS MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER RECORD-KEEPING MACHINE…IT DOES MORE THAN PROCESS DATA. THE COMPUTER IS AN ELECTRONIC-SERVANT, SERVING MANKIND…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO WORK…A BETTER PLACE IN WHICH TO LIVE.

THIS REPORT WAS PRINTED IN JUST 4 SECONDS.

I’m particularly fascinated by the way that, in the midst of brave-new-world boosterism (“THESE MARVELOUS TOOLS,” “TREMENDOUS ADVANCES”), the print-out maps new human-computer interactions onto a much older master-servant relationship. Plus ça change, and all that.

[This report was posted in only 4 seconds.]

Since I keep posting images of and excerpts from Marshall McLuhan’s (and Quentin Fiore’s) The Medium is the Massage, I thought I’d also draw your attention to a new book, the amazing-looking The Electric Information Age Book (2012).

Maria Popova, over at BrainPickings, describes the book:

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback tells the fascinating story of these collaborations and how they created a new media form “designed to put into popular form, or into more understandable form, some of the greatest ideas of our time.” … The promise of that story is a deeper understanding of contemporary visual culture, the convergence of highbrow and lowbrow, the vernacular of advertising, the dynamics of newspaper and magazine publishing, the creation of avant-garde mass culture, and a wealth in between.

I am definitely getting this books as soon as possible.

In particular, I’m excited to read it because teaching Massage raised, appropriately enough, fascinating questions about the relationship of form and content in the book itself.

Popova continues:

McLuhan, Agel, and Fiore embraced “the book’s intrinsic strengths as a site for synthesis and surprise,” as [Adam] Michaels eloquently puts it, and forged a visionary model in which the unconventional intertwining of form and content engaged audiences with new, almost cinematic modes of delivery.

When we read excerpts of the book for class, I scanned them and provided them as PDFs in addition to having the entire book in the bookstore. This prompted a truly fascinating discussion amongst my students about the differences between reading it as a book and on a screen.

As rapturous as McLuhan can be about the possibilities of television and of electric circuitry, my students generally agreed that the message (or Massage, rather) fared best in print, on paper. They argued that—more than four decades after the book’s publication and in the midst of a digital age—seeing interrelated layers of text and image on a screen is not exactly new and exciting. But their peculiar marriage in a book, and especially the way they are brought together in this book, continues to offer “synthesis and surprise.”

More precisely, some students continued, reading the paper version of Massage means seeing yourself holding it and thus understanding it as a strange, synthetic, but whole object, as yet itself rent by the fragmentation it portended. (This was, of course, something that McLuhan and Fiore played with explicitly if incompletely, as in the two spreads above.)

Next time I teach Massage, I’ll have to assign The Electric Information Age Book. And that’s a very exciting prospect, indeed.

Here’s a gorgeous photograph (from the excellent hadarahgeesie) of a favorite bit of obsolete classroom technology: the overhead projector.

I’ve never used one to teach—its neighbors on the timeline (chalkboards on one side, digital projectors on the other) have treated me well—but I find the presence of overheads somehow comforting. Even having to roll them away from the board, awkwardly, trying not to get the wheels caught on the cord or to tumble the whole thing, shatteringly, to the ground, they are an obstinate reminder (stubbornly there) of the persistence of the past in the present.

I have written before on bookmobility about being brought up short, being reminded of how quickly things can change, of how foreign the now-familiar once was. The overhead projector is something different, or perhaps opposite.

It is the glowingly, creakily, even assertively vestigial organ of the classroom. Upward- and outward-reaching, it nonetheless nestles, crouching, waiting.

If architecture communicates (or communication creates architecture), then what does an invisible building say?

Kelly Chan, with The Atlantic Cities, has a post up describing a massive new South Korean tower whose ambition is to disappear:

Now, international practice GDS Architects are setting out to build what will allegedly be the world’s first invisible tower, an observation ‘anti tower’ that will be the first design proposal for a landmark that earns its keep by essentially refusing to be a landmark.

The architects describe their goals, and thus what they want to communicate thusly:

Instead of symbolizing prominence as another of the world’s “tallest and best” towers, it sets itself apart by celebrating the global community rather than focusing on itself. the tower subtly demonstrates Korea’s rising position in the world by establishing its most powerful presence through diminishing its presense. Korea will have a unique position of having the “best” tower by having an “anti tower”.

Like Chan seems to be, I’m both immensely charmed by and rather skeptical about these claims. In particular, the ironic paradox of the bolded section points to the key question: What happens when effacement, or absence, is meant to be both a means of dissolution and a cause for celebration? How, in other words, can the “diminishing” of presence be used to assert a “most powerful presence”?

It appears an invisible building can communicate quite a lot, though what precisely it’s saying keeps, well, fading into the background before I can see it clearly.

I suppose we’ll just have to wait until it’s built and give it another go.

—-

PS: Here’s another (and, to my eye, more beautiful) invisible-tower proposal, this one for Taiwan, by Sou Fujimoto.

This is a photo (taken by yours truly) of the outdoor spiral staircase at the Gropius House.

According to the tour guide, Gropius’s young daughter had two requests when they built their rural Massachusetts home: that her room’s entire ceiling be a skylight, and that her floor be sand like a beach. The skylight was physically untenable (flat-roof construction + glass + snow = crash) and the sand wasn’t a great idea given the cork floors in the rest of the house, so the parents gave her instead a door onto the second-floor deck, the only such door in the house. To allow non-through-the-bedroom access, Gropius incorporated this gorgeous staircase, which not only solved the access problem but balanced out his playful takes on the center-entry colonial and New England clapboard.

A good story plus good design plus a beautiful setting is always a uniquely pleasurable experience. (I’ll post more from the Gropius house sometime soon!)

While I’ve blogged here about the problems of mistaking books for various other objects, and specifically of mistaking books for tools of war, I’ll admit to always liking this line from Doctor Who.

(Source: bella-bohemia, via ghardin)

Here is another delightfully batty object from the archives (though unlike the first two of those links, alas, I haven’t seen this one in person…yet).

It’s a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, held by the British Museum, commemorating the brief life and death of his second wombat. Below the drawing, he inscribed a parody of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh in honor of his dear, strange pet:

I never reared a young wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he was most sweet and fat
And tail-less he was sure to die

What I find most intriguing about the whole thing—aside, perhaps, from the tragically upended, tailless wombat—is that this drawing is, by far, not the weirdest exotic-animal-related part of Rossetti’s life. From his Wikipedia page:

This fascination with exotic animals continued throughout Rossetti’s life, finally culminating in the purchase of a llama and a Toucan which Rossetti would dress in a cowboy hat and persuade to ride the llama round the dining table for his amusement.

A cowboy hat. On a toucan. On a llama. I can die happy now.