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Clutter

April 21, 2009

Tim Bray, the software writer and self-professed "sicko deranged audiophile," is getting rid of his jewel cases. He's been ripping his large collection of CDs into digital files and tweaking his hifi setup to play music off hard drives rather than disks. "I can’t wait to shovel the disks into boxes or binders or whatever, and regain a few square feet of wall," he says. I'm with him there. The CD jewel case is the single worst technology ever invented by man. It defines, in a truly Platonic sense, the term "piece of crap."

Now, Bray is looking forward to the fast-approaching day when he'll also be able to get rid of his many books, leaving his walls even emptier. Their contents, too, will be digitized, turned into files that can be displayed on a handy e-book reader like Amazon's Kindle. He writes: "I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular." Physical books, he says, "are toast," and that's "a good thing."

He has a sense that removing the "clutter" of his books, along with his other media artifacts, will turn his home into a secular version of a "monastic cell": "I dream of a mostly-empty room, brilliantly lit, the outside visible from inside. The chief furnishings would be a few well-loved faces and voices because it’s about people not things." He is quick to add, though, that it will be a monastic cell outfitted with the latest data-processing technologies. Networked computers will "bring the universe of words and sounds and pictures to hand on demand. But not get dusty or pile up in corners."

It's a nice dream, and a common one: the shucking off of material possessions to achieve a purer, spiritually richer life. But there's a deep, perhaps even tragic, flaw in Bray's thinking, at least when it comes to those books. He's assuming that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn't. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.

The author Steven Johnson, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, praises many of the new features of digital e-book readers, but he's under no illusion that books will make the transition from page to screen unchanged. We're going to lose something along the way. That became clear to him the moment he began using his new Kindle:

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways ... Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article - sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. [As reading shifts to networked devices,] I fear that one of the great joys of book reading - the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas - will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

Whatever its charms, the online world is a world of clutter. It's designed to be a world of clutter - of distractions and interruptions, of attention doled out by the thimbleful, of little loosely connected bits whirling in and out of consciousness. The irony in Bray's vision of a bookless monastic cell is that it was the printed book itself that brought the ethic of the monastery - the ethic of deep attentiveness, of contemplativeness, of singlemindedness - to the general public. When the printed book began arriving in people's homes in the late fifteenth century, it brought with it, as Elizabeth Eisenstein describes in her magisterial history The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, "the same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion."

When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.

Posted by nick at April 21, 2009 10:43 AM

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Comments

Excellent post!

I especially like your observation that a "change in form is always, as well, a change in content." Brings to mind the line from the Buddhist 'Perfection of Wisdom Heart Sutra', "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is also Form."

I agree with your point about clutter and how it merely migrates from the physical to the cloud. Perhaps there is a "law of non-reduction of clutter" which says that clutter, which is another name for entropy, increases monotonically with time.

Posted by: atanu at May 7, 2009 01:10 AM

When I'm invited to someone's house for the first time, I try to sneak a peek at the bookshelves. A glance of years of accumulated reading tells you a whole lot about them.

Houses without books seem empty.

Posted by: Thomas Otter at May 9, 2009 01:52 AM

Technology enables us to recycle metaphors like we recycle fashion. Yes, we will be flipping, swiping, scrolling through content on a tablet the size of a A-format paperback as thick as an iPhone or iPod touch. The biggest change, for the good, is more people wiil be reading more books as they commute by train, planes and automobiles instead of seas of people blissfully staring out of windows with whites strings coming out of there ears. And then, I will finally be able your new book instead of it sitting on the shelf gathering dust with all my other dusty unread books.

Posted by: Chris Velevitch at May 18, 2009 12:32 AM

I just wrote about this on my new blog. Getting a Kindle has made me re-think about the stuff that collects inside my apartment, and how unnecessary books and CDs are in their physical form. At the end of the day it's about the content, not the stuff it's printed on or burned into.

http://www.itistyped.com/2009/05/15/bjork-bad-for-environment/

Posted by: Bart at May 19, 2009 03:37 PM

Clutter

April 21, 2009

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