From Simon Reynolds’s interview with Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

SR: I wanted to ask you about an experience that seems to have been utterly formative and enduringly inspirational: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That is a real touchstone moment for you, right?

GM: That was a cauldron. It was a tremendously complex experience, struggle, event. A series of events. In a lot of ways, it’s been misconstrued: there are many versions of it. Each person had their own version of it. The affair began when there’d been a lot of protests in the Bay Area in the spring of 1964 against racist hiring practices. At the Bank of America, at car dealerships, at the Oakland Tribune —black people were not hired at all for any visible job. So there were no black sales people, no black tellers or clerks. A lot of the organizing for these protests, which involved mass arrests and huge picket lines and publicity, was done on the Berkeley campus. Different political groups would set up a table and distribute leaflets and collect donations and announce picket lines and sit-ins. The business community put a lot of pressure on the University of California to stop this, and the university instituted a policy that no political advocacy could take place on the campus. No distribution of literature, no information about events where the law might be broken. So people set up their tables anyway. And the university had them arrested. And out of that came the Free Speech Movement, saying, “We demand the right to speak freely on campus like anywhere else. We’ve read the Constitution.” …

This Free Speech Movement was an extraordinary series of events where people stepped out of the anonymity of their own lives and either spoke in public or argued with everybody they knew all the time. It was three or four solid months of arguing in public: in dorm rooms, on walks, on picket lines. “What’s this place for? Why are we here? What’s this country about? Is this country a lie, or can we keep its promises even if it won’t?” All these questions had come to life, and it was just the most dynamic and marvelous experience. And there were moments of tremendous drama and fear and courage. I used to walk around the campus thinking how lucky I was to be here at that moment. You really had a sense not that history was being made in some real sense for the world, but that you were making your own history — you along with other people. You were taking part in events, you were shaping events. You weren’t just witnessing events that would change your life. That, as I understood it, would leave you unsatisfied, because you couldn’t reenact what Thomas Jefferson called the “public happiness” of acting in public with other people. He was referring to his own moments as a revolutionary, drafting the Declaration of Independence. In that meeting, people pledged their lives and their sacred honor. And they knew that if they lost, they’d all be shot. Because they were acting together in public, they were taken out of themselves. They were acting on a stage that they themselves had built. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. In that moment I didn’t have to wonder how it would feel to be that free. I was that free. And so were countless other people.

SR: And while all this was going on, you also had the tremendous excitement of the Beatles, the Stones, and then, a little later, Bob Dylan. Must have been a pretty exciting time to be young.

GM: The Free Speech thing was the fall of 1964. And the Beatles dominated the spring of ’64. One thing I will never forget about being a student here was reading in the San Francisco Chronicle that this British rock ‘n’ roll group was going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show. And I thought that sounded funny: I didn’t know they had rock ‘n’ roll in England. So I went down to the commons room of my dorm to watch it and I figured there’d be an argument over what to watch. But instead there were 200 people there, and everybody had turned up to see The Ed Sullivan Show. “Where did all these people come from?” I didn’t know people cared about rock ‘n’ roll. I thought it was quite odd. …

I go back to my dorm room and all you’re hearing is the Beatles, either on record or coming out of the radio. I sit down with this guy who’s older than me — he’s a senior, I’m a sophomore — and he was this very pompous kind of guy, but I’ll never forget his words. It was late at night and he said, “Could be that just as our generation was brought together by Elvis Presley, it may be that we will be brought together again by the Beatles.” What a bizarre thing to say! But of course he was right. Later that week I went down to Palo Alto — I had grown up there and in Menlo Park, on the Peninsula — and there was this one outpost of bohemianism, a coffee house called Saint Michael’s Alley, where they only played folk music. But that night they were only playing Meet the Beatles. And it just sounded like the spookiest stuff I’d ever heard. Particularly “Don’t Bother Me,” the George Harrison song. So the spring of ’64 was all Beatles. But the fall was something else.

“For us, of course, it’s about keeping Jimi authentically correct.” So says Janie Hendrix, explaining the motivation behind her effort to turn her long-dead brother into a Strat-wielding hologram. Tupac Shakur’s recent leap from grave to stage was just the first act of what promises to be an orgy of cultural necrophilia. Billboard reports that holographic second comings are in the works not just for Jimi Hendrix but for Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Peter Tosh, and even Rick James. Superfreaky! What could be more authentically correct than an image of an image?

I’m really looking forward to seeing the Doors with Jim Morrison back out in front – that guy from the Cult never did it for me – but I admit it may be kind of discomforting to see the rest of the band looking semi-elderly while the Lizard King appears as his perfect, leather-clad 24-year-old self. Jeff Jampol, the Doors’ manager, says, “Hopefully, ‘Jim Morrison’ will be able to walk right up to you, look you in the eye, sing right at you and then turn around and walk away.” That’s all well and good, but I’m sure Jampol knows that the crowd isn’t going to be satisfied unless “Jim” whips out his virtual willy. (Can you arrest a hologram for obscenity?) In any case, hearing the Morrison Hologram sing “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection” is going to be just priceless – a once-in-a-lifetime moment, replayable endlessly.

I think it was Nietzsche who said that what kills you only makes you stronger in the marketplace.

C30, C60, C90, go!
Off the radio, I get a constant flow
Cause I hit it, pause it, record it and play
Or turn it rewind and rub it away!
-Bow Wow Wow, 1980

When I turned twelve, in the early 1970s, I received, as a birthday present from my parents, a portable, Realistic-brand cassette tape recorder from Radio Shack. Within hours, I became a music pirate. I had a friend who lived next door, and his older brother had a copy of Abbey Road, an album I had taken a shine to. I carried my recorder over to their house, set its little plastic microphone (it was a mono machine) in front of one of the speakers of their stereo, and proceeded to make a cassette copy of the record. I used the same technique at my own house to record hit songs off the radio as well as make copies of my siblings’ and friends’ LPs and 45s. It never crossed my mind that I was doing anything wrong. I didn’t think of myself as a pirate, and I didn’t think of my recordings as being illicit. I was just being a fan.

I was hardly unique. Tape recorders, whether reel-to-reel or cassette, were everywhere, and pretty much any kid who had access to one made copies of albums and songs. (If you’ve read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, you know that when Jobs went off to college in 1972, he brought with him a comprehensive collection of Dylan bootlegs on tape.) When, a couple of years later, cassette decks became commonplace components of stereo systems, ripping songs from records and the radio became even simpler. There was a reason that cassette decks had input jacks as well as output jacks. My friends and I routinely exchanged cassette copies of albums and mixtapes. It was the norm.

We also, I should point out, bought a lot of records, particularly when we realized that pretty much everything being played on the radio was garbage. (I apologize to all Doobie Brothers fans who happen to be reading this.) There are a few reasons why record sales and record copying flourished simultaneously. First, in order to make a copy of an album, someone in your circle of friends had to own an original; there were no anonymous, long-distance exchanges of music. Second, vinyl was a superior medium to tape because, among other things, it made it easier to play individual tracks (and it was not unusual to play a favorite track over and over again). Third, record sleeves were cool and they had considerable value in and of themselves. Fourth, owning the record had social cachet. And fifth, records weren’t that expensive. What a lot of people forget about LPs back then is that most of them, not long after their original release, were remaindered as what were called cutouts, and you could pick them up for $1.99 or so. Even as a high-schooler working a part-time, minimum-wage job, you could afford to buy a couple of records a week, which was – believe it or not – plenty.

The reason I’m telling you all this is not that I suddenly feel guilty about my life as a teenage music pirate. I feel no guilt whatsoever. It’s just that this weekend I happened to read an article in the Wall Street Journal, by Listen.com founder Rob Reid, which argued that “in the swashbuckling arena of digital piracy, the publishing world is acquitting itself far better than the brash music industry.” Drawing a parallel between the music and book businesses, Reid writes:

The book business is now further into its own digital history than music was when Napster died. Both histories began when digital media became portable. For music, that was 1999, when the record labels ended a failing legal campaign to ban MP3 players. For books, it came with the 2007 launch of the Kindle. Publishing has gotten off to a much better start. Both industries saw a roughly 20% drop in physical sales four years after their respective digital kickoffs. But e-book sales have largely made up the shortfall in publishing—unlike digital music sales, which stayed stubbornly close to zero for years.

This doesn’t prove that music lovers are crooks. Rather, it shows that actually selling things to early adopters is wise. Publishers did this—unlike the record labels, which essentially insisted that the first digital generation either steal online music or do without it entirely.

That all seems sensible enough. But Reid’s argument is misleading. He oversimplifies media history, and he glosses over some big and fundamental differences between the book market and the music market. As my own youthful experience suggests, music lovers ARE crooks, and we’ve been crooks for decades. (“Crooks” is his term, of course, not mine.) Moreover, the “digital history” of music did not begin in 1999. It began in 1982 when albums began to be released on compact disk. Yes, there are some similarities between the music and book industries, and they’re worth attending to, but the fact that the two industries have (so far) taken different courses in the digital era probably has far more to do with the basic differences between them – differences in history, technology, and customers, among other things – than with differences in executive decision-making.

Let me review some of the most salient differences and the way they’ve influenced the divergent paths the industries have taken:

Kids copied music long before music went digital. The unauthorized copying of songs and albums did not begin with the arrival of the web or of MP3s or of Napster. It has been a part of the culture of pop music since the 1960s. There has been no such tradition with books. Xeroxing a book was not an easy task, and it was fairly expensive, too. Nobody did it, except, maybe, for the occasional oddball. So, even though the large-scale trading of bootlegged songs made possible by the net had radically different implications for the music business than the small-scale trading that had taken place previously, digital copying and trading didn’t feel particularly different from making and exchanging tapes. It seemed like a new variation on an old practice.

Fidelity matters less for popular music than for books. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. I was happy with my copy of Abbey Road despite its abysmal sound quality and the fact that – horrors! – I had only recorded one channel of a stereo mix. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 70s, the main way a lot of people listened to music was through crappy a.m. car radios and crappy a.m. transistor radios. And need I mention eight-tracks? The human ear and the human brain seem to be very adept at turning lo-fi music signals into fulfilling listening experiences – the auditory imagination somehow fills in the missing signal. Early MP3s, though they were often ripped at very low bit rates, sounded just fine to the vast majority of the music-listening public, so quality was no barrier to mass piracy. A lo-fi copy of a book, in contrast, is a misery to read. Blurry text, missing pages, clunky navigation: it takes a very dedicated reader to overcome even fairly minor shortcomings in a copy of a book. That’s one of the main reasons that even though bootlegged copies of popular books have been freely available online for quite some time now, few people bother with them.

Books never had a CD phase. Music was digitized long before the arrival of the web. During the 1980s, record companies digitized their catalogues, and digital CDs soon displaced tapes and vinyl as the medium of choice for music. The transition was a boon to the music industry because a whole lot of consumers bought new CD copies of albums that they already owned on vinyl. But the boon (as Reid notes) also set the stage for the subsequent bust. When personal computers with CD-ROM drives made it possible to rip music CDs into MP3 files, all the music that most people would ever want was soon available in a form that could be easily exchanged online. The CD also had the unintended effect of making the physical record album less valuable. CD cases were small, plastic, and annoying; the booklets wedged inside them were rarely removed; and the disks themselves had a space-age sterility that rendered them entirely charmless. By reducing the perceived value of the physical product, CDs made it easier for consumers to discard that product – in fact, getting rid of a CD collection was a great joy to many of us. The book business did not go through a digitization phase prior to the arrival of the web, so there was no supply of digital books waiting to be traded when online trading became possible. It was an entirely different situation from a technological standpoint.

The average music buyer is younger than the average book buyer. Young people have long been a primary market for popular music. Young people also tend to have the spare time, the tech savvy, the obliviousness to risk, the constrained wallets, and the passion for music required to do a whole lot of bootlegging. Books tend to be sold to older people. Older people make lousy pirates. That’s another crucial reason why book publishers have been sheltered from piracy in a way that record companies weren’t.

When Apple first promoted its iTunes app – this was quite a while before it got into music retailing – it used the slogan “Rip Mix Burn.” Though it wouldn’t admit it, it wanted people to engage in widespread copying and trading of music, because the more free digital music files that went into circulation, the more attractive its computers (and subsequently its iPods) became. (MP3s, in economic terms, were complements to Apple’s core products.) That slogan never had an analogue in the book business because the history, technology, and customers of the book business were fundamentally different at the start of the digital age. People like Reid like to suggest that if record company executives had made different decisions a decade ago, the fate of their industry would have been different. I’m skeptical about that. Sure, they could have made different decisions, but I really don’t think it would have changed the course of history much. They were basically screwed.

And executives in the publishing industry are probably kidding themselves if they think that they’re responsible for the fact that, so far, their business hasn’t gone through the wrenching changes that have affected their peers in the music business. And if they think they can use the experience of the music business as a guide to plot their own future course, they’re probably kidding themselves there, too. The impending forces of disruption in the book world may resemble the forces that battered the music world, but they’re different in many important ways.

We want to think an ebook is a book. But although an ebook is certainly related to a book, it’s not a book. It’s an ebook. And we don’t yet know what an ebook is. We are getting some early hints, though. Oprah Winfrey dropped one just yesterday, when she announced the relaunch of her famous book club. Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 is, she said, a book club for “our digital world.” What’s most interesting about it, at least for media prognosticators, is that each of Oprah’s picks will be issued in a special ebook edition, available for Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, that will, as Julie Bosman reports, “include margin notes from Ms. Winfrey highlighting her favorite passages.”

Those passages will appear as underlined text in the ebook edition, followed by an icon in the shape of an “O.” Click on the text or the icon and up pops Oprah’s reflection on the passage. For instance, in the first Book Club 2.0 choice, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, the following sentence is highlighted:

Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Oprah’s gloss on the sentence reads:

That may be my favorite line in the whole book. First of all, it’s so beautifully constructed, and it captures what this journey was all about. She started out looking to find herself—looking for clarity—and that’s exactly what happens. The essence of the book is held right there in that sentence. It means that every step was worth it. It means all the skepticism of whether this hike is the right thing or not the right thing—it all gets resolved in that sentence.

For the reader, Oprah’s notes become part of the book, a new authorial voice woven into the original text. There’s plenty of precedent for this, of course. Annotated and critical editions of books routinely include an overlay of marginal comments and other notes, which very much influence the reader’s experience of the book. But such editions are geared for specialized audiences – students and scholars – and they tend to appear well after the original edition. Oprah’s notes are different, and they point to some of the ways that ebooks may overthrow assumptions that have built up during the centuries that people have been reading bound books. For one thing, it becomes fairly easy to publish different versions of the same book, geared to different audiences or even different retailers, at the same time. We may, for example, see a proliferation of “celebrity editions,” with comments from politicians, media stars, and other prominent folk. There may also be “sponsored editions,” in which a company buys the right to, say, have its CEO annotate an ebook (that could be a real money-maker for authors and publishers of volumes of management advice). Writers themselves could come out with premium editions that include supplemental comments or other material – for a couple of bucks more than the standard edition. There’s no reason the annotations need be limited to text, either. In future book club selections, what pops up when you click the O icon might be a video of Oprah sharing her comments. And since an ebook is in essence an application running on a networked computer, the added material could be personalized for individual readers or could be continually updated.

Because ebooks tend to sell for a much lower price than traditional hard covers, publishers will have strong incentives to try all these sorts of experiments as well as many others, particularly if the experiments have the potential to strengthen sales or open new sources of revenues. In small or large ways, the experience of reading, and of writing, will change as books are remodeled to fit their new container.

The front page of today’s New York Times serves up a cautionary tale:

On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant.

He found it irresistibly funny and, as one does in this age of instant sharing, he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.”

Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon …

55 gallons? That’s a lot of frictionless sharing.

I realized this morning that my last two posts share a common theme, so I thought I might as well go ahead and make a trilogy of it. To the voices of Kraus and Teleb I’ll add that of the Pope:

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved. When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

(Aside to Vatican: Change the background on your site. It’s very noisy.)

Making the case for silent communication has always been a tricky business, since language itself wants to make an oxymoron of the idea, but it’s trickier than ever today. We’ve come to confuse communication, and indeed thought itself, with the exchange of explicit information. What can’t be codified and transmitted, turned into data, loses its perceived value. (What code does a programmer use to render silence?) We seek ever higher bandwidth and ever lower latency, not just in our networks but in our relations with others and even in ourselves. The richness of implicit communication, of thought and emotion unmanifested in expression, comes to be seen as mere absence, as wasted bandwidth.

Whitman in a way is the most internet-friendly of the great poets. He would have made a killer blogger (though Twitter would have unmanned him). But even Whitman, I’m pretty sure, would have tired of the narrowness of so much bandwidth, would in the end have become a refugee from the Kingdom of the Explicit:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

“Unaccountable” indeed. I’m speechless.

I don’t fully understand this excerpt from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s forthcoming book Antifragile, but I found this bit to be intriguing:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal — which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. … Now let’s add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones.

I’ve long suspected, based on observations of myself as well as observations of society, that, beyond the psychological and cognitive strains produced by what we call information overload, there is a point in intellectual inquiry when adding more information decreases understanding rather than increasing it. Taleb’s observation that as the frequency of information sampling increases, the amount of noise we take in expands more quickly than the amount of signal might help to explain the phenomenon, particularly if human understanding hinges as much or more on the noise-to-signal ratio of the information we take in as on the absolute amount of signal we’re exposed to. Because we humans seem to be natural-born signal hunters, we’re terrible at regulating our intake of information. We’ll consume a ton of noise if we sense we may discover an added ounce of signal. So our instinct is at war with our capacity for making sense.

If this is indeed a problem, it’s not an isolated one. We have a general tendency to believe that if x amount of something is good, then 2x must be better. This leads, for instance, to a steady increase in the average portion size of a soft drink – until the negative effects on health become so apparent that they’re impossible to ignore. Even then, though, it remains difficult to moderate our personal behavior. When given the choice, we continue to order the Big Gulps.