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Avatars of the Word. From Papyrus
to Cyberspace. By James O’Donnell (Cambridge Mass, London:
Harvard University Press, 1998; paperback edition, 2000).
This is the paperback version of a paperback argument,
addressed to ‘people who read books and use computers and
wonder what the two have to do with each other’ (ix). The
argument is roughly that the age of cyberspace is understandable
as a return to practices that began with the manuscript.
Surfing the web is like using canon tables to jump between
sites in the Gospels; clicking hypertext links is like using
the bound manuscript that broke radically with the enforced
linearity of papyrus scrolls; the great libraries of antiquity
are no different in ambition from the internet as virtual
library; collaborative scholarship was as common before
as it should become now; a text like Casiodorus’s guide
for scribes can effectively be read in terms of a word-processing
handbook; user-made anthologies were once the norm and may
return to that status; and thus, to bring it all together,
‘the relative stasis of the printed book that we are familiar
with is an anomaly in the history of the written word’ (78).
What does this mean? On one level, O’Donnell appears to
be arguing there is no need to panic: the only thing we
really risk is a return to a late classical or early medieval
stage of grace. Yet the sociological differences are surely
so great between our globalizing mass cultures and the isolated
scholars of antiquity that few could or should take the
comparisons seriously. O’Donnell is rather more productive
when he uses such perspective to argue, for example, that
the individual author will no longer prevail, that our information
economy is now based on managing abundance rather than scarcity
(thus ‘an economy of amusement’), that the university is
becoming a youth camp with an intellectual shopping mall,
that we might cheerfully abandon the restrictions of Western
civilization (‘not something to be cherished’), and that
serious issues such as internet copyright concern only the
commercialization of Disney videos and dubious contemporary
music: we must merely ‘look hard at the new media for ways
to keep free and open economy in ideas, while letting the
idea-less thrash each other with lawsuits and threats of
trade wars over cartoons and noise’ (98). Well written,
closer to the stuff of many current debates, but not many
of these reflections will provide much help to anyone making
actual decisions in or about cyberspace.
The big historical hyperlinking, freely offered as stimulating
comparison and fully justified in terms of this book’s own
approach to being a book, must inevitably be more obvious
to the author than to most. As a professional classicist,
an expert in Augustine and Casiodorus, co-founder of the
Bryn Mawr Classical Review and Vice Provost for Information
Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania,
O’Donnell is modestly self-described as ‘an older practitioner
of the new’ (89). And yet, born in 1950, he is surely not
old enough to sound quite this old. Depth and nuance is
all very well, but these issues merit rather more. Here
there is simply too much professorial mucking about, too
numerous too brief excursions to only half-developed thoughts,
and too much delight in placing Augustine next to Derrida,
or Nietzsche next to Sting, for anything like a substantially
coherent approach or critique to emerge. For instance, McLuhan
is mentioned several times and belittled for the limits
of theory, but is strangely deigned unworthy of discussion
on anything the level of ideas. We are somehow expected
to know and agree with our author’s hidden winks. Unfortunately
both the book and cyberspace hide the subtle intimations:
O’Donnell might be surprised to find he reaches rather less
community than his erudition presupposes.
What we have here is ultimately a series of fascinating
university lectures, the relative immediacy and orality
of which seems to escape theorization. The context and style
is inescapably American; the presupposed reader is a real
or would-be American university professor, apparently unaware
that a wider world is now catching the words. From this
listener’s non-American perspective, O’Donnell thus gratuitously
mixes memories of books with an adventure of the self in
history, family and media, devolving into first-person narrative
whenever some kind of sincerity seems called for, failing
to convince beyond those necessarily distant depths.
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- Last update
20 July 1999
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