Which is stronger: technology’s power to shape local culture, or local culture’s power to influence the way technology is adopted and used? If it’s the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it’s the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool’s use. Culture prevails.

We’re going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers – in the form of both devices and apps – spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries – the U.S. and Germany – the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales.

The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg and his printing press and the home of the Frankfurt Book Fair, is very much a country of the book. Bookstores are everywhere, and readers are attentive not only to the quality of a book’s writing but to the quality of its paper and its binding. As Spiegel’s Aaron Wiener recently observed, “Books are simply more deeply ingrained in the German way of life [than in the American].” German readers continue to have a strong sense that reading from a printed page is superior to reading from a screen.

There are also economic differences. In Germany, publishers set book prices, and the prices don’t vary from store to store. E-book prices follow these same rules, which means that they have not undercut print prices to the same degree that they have in the U.S. But this policy, too, is rooted in culture: it is aimed at preserving the diversity of the book trade. (It must pain Eric Holder enormously to travel to Germany and see so many flourishing bookshops.) E-books are also taxed at a higher rate than print books, which enjoy a tax exemption in Germany – another manifestation of the book’s special place in the culture.

So what happens from here? In the long run, will the book markets of Germany and the U.S. continue to diverge, with the e-book becoming the dominant form of the book in America but the printed book retaining its dominance in Germany? It will be interesting, and illuminating, to watch. One small hint: Although e-books represent just 1 percent of the German book market, sales of e-books nearly doubled there last year. As Dominique Pleimling, of the Institute of Book Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, says, “everything may change very quickly.”

One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight.

The wick also proved an amazingly hardy creation. It remained the dominant lighting technology all the way to the nineteenth century, when it was replaced first by the wickless gas lamp and then, more decisively, by Edison’s electricity-fueled incandescent bulb with its glowing metal filament. Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along with its many practical benefits, electric light also brought subtle and unexpected changes to the way people lived. The fireplace, the candle, and the oil lamp had always been the focal point of households. Fire was, as Schivelbusch puts it, “the soul of the house.” Families would in the evening gather in a central room, drawn by the flickering flame, to chat about the day’s events or otherwise pass the time together. Electric light, together with central heat, dissolved that long tradition. Family members began to spend more time in different rooms in the evening, studying or reading or working alone. Each person gained more privacy, and a greater sense of autonomy, but the cohesion of the family weakened.

Cold and steady, electric light lacked the allure of the flame. It was not mesmerizing or soothing but strictly functional. It turned light into an industrial commodity. A German diarist in 1944, forced to use candles instead of lightbulbs during nightly air raids, was struck by the difference. “We have noticed,” he wrote, “in the ‘weaker’ light of the candle, objects have a different, a much more marked profile — it gives them a quality of ‘reality.’” This quality, he continued, “is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality it flattens them. Electric light imparts too much brightness and thus things lose body, outline, substance — in short, their essence.”

We’re still attracted to a flame at the end of a wick. We light candles to set a romantic or a calming mood, to mark a special occasion. We buy ornamental lamps that are crafted to look like candles or candleholders with bulbs shaped as stylized flames. But we can no longer know what it was like when fire was the source of all light. The number of people who remember life before the arrival of Edison’s bulb has dwindled to just a few, and when they go they’ll take with them all remaining memory of that earlier, pre-electric world. The same will happen, sometime toward the end of this century, with the memory of the world that existed before the computer and the Internet became commonplace. We’ll be the ones who bear it away.

All technological change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

This brief essay originally appeared as the epilogue of my 2008 book The Big Switch.

Here’s an ingenious contraption:

The creator, Lior Elazary, provides a full explanation of the clock here, along with instructions for building your own. Here’s my favorite part of the instructions:

Start by creating a 12” diameter disc and attach a Flip-Flop to it. A Flip-Flop is a device that alternates its state with a given input. For example, a politician might change his stance on a specific issue based on some event, and then will change it back based on another event. In that case, we say he is a Flip-Flop, and we might be able to build a computer out of him.

[via Slashdot]

Now this is pretty cool: The U.K. band I Like Trains has a new album coming out called The Shallows, which was inspired, at least in part, by my book of the same name. The album is an eerily propulsive work – heavy and light at the same time – and it’s one that’s easy to get lost in.

The record comes out on May 7, but if you order a physical copy now – from here – you can download a digital copy immediately.

And take a listen to the first single, “Mnemosyne”:

Clay Shirky says:

The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

“Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment”: that’s well put. We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

Perpetual boredom is an unattractive state. So is perpetual nonboredom.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, I will be giving a talk, “The Book as Gadget: The Rise of E-Readers and E-Reading,” at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The lecture is part of the Newberry’s History of the Book series. It’s free and open to the public, but you have to register in advance. Details are here.

One thing I’m going to miss about the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, now that it’s been consigned to the dumpster of history, is the spines – all 45 of them, ranked across the shelf like stoic beefeaters.

They’re handsome things, somehow managing to be imposing and inviting at the same time. But the best part is that each one is branded with a pair of index words, there to tell you where the volume begins and where it ends. You thus get a bunch of almost-random two-word phrases to conjure with. Some don’t rise above their functionality: India Ireland, for instance, or Accounting Architecture. But others open up new and unexpected territory to wander in. Here, for the record, are some of my favorites:

Freon Holderlin (a man I’d like to meet, despite his reputation for coldness)

Menage Ottawa (a perfect oxymoron)

Chicago Death (Jack White’s new side project)

Light Metabolism (what the Theory of Everything, once discovered, will be called)

Excretion Geometry (a field understood by only seven people in the world)

Arctic Biosphere (Freon Holderlin lives here, according to rumor)

Krasnokamsk Menadra (when I take up meditation, this will be what I chant)

And my favoritemost of all:

Decorative Edison