Not long ago, I attended a symposium at which Dominique Raccah, publisher of Sourcebooks, talked about some of the exciting technological advances e-readers had to forward to. (The other member of the panel was Dan Sinker, who suggested that computers are obsolete and that novels will henceforth be written on cell phones by teenage Japanese girls.) When asked which innovations she was most enthusiastic about, Raccah said that—with the new e-book technology—it would soon be possible to know at any given moment to know who was reading the same book you are. This would, she said, provide a “platform for a conversation.” As it happened, I was sitting next to a book critic. We exchanged looks of mutual horror.
It’s fair to say that words like platform and conversation have been applied figuratively these days in so many ways to virtual realms that they are completely removed their literal meanings. However, the question remains: is the opportunity for a contemporaneous conversation with other readers of the same book something that anyone has been clambering for? Or is connecting Kindle readers with each other merely the next logical technological step regardless of demand? Reading has historically been a solitary activity and, I always assumed, a self-selecting pursuit, insofar as every reader I know enjoys quiet and solitude as indispensible elements of the reading experience.
I was thinking about this the other day while reading Louis Menand in the New Yorker on the letters of T.S. Eliot. When Eliot published “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the essay that Menand credits with creating the modern university English department—in the Egoist, the magazine boasted 185 subscribers. Despite the absence of what we now call connectivity, Eliot was somehow able to start a conversation that continues to influence the study of literature almost nine decades later. Of course, the key mechanism at work is genius, or at the very least, insight. Would a chat on Kindle among readers of The Help—the tagline for the film is “Join the conversation”—break comparable ground? It could, theoretically, but as anyone who as ever sat next to a stranger on an airplane knows conversation for conversation’s sake is not automatically a good thing.
When St. Augustine found his patron St. Ambrose reading silently he was astonished. For most of the history of reading it was, in fact, a group activity because for most of human history nearly everyone was illiterate. Most Romans of the senatorial class had Greek slaves to read to them and write for them. In the medieval period, clerks and monks could read and write. in the 16th and 17th century a decided minority could read and write. Often artisans would hire a reader so that they could participate in the on-going debates about religion and politics. the same held true of workshops and hearths during the 18th and, indeed, 19th centuries. In short, until recently, historically speaking, reading was a communal activity. Additionally, the dissemination of knowledge has always relied on networks, for example Erasmus' letters and the Republic of Letters, in which those interested in ideas used letters, journals, and related etc to have conversations about ideas and reactions to others' reactions about ideas took place in closed loops. Indeed, as various historians have shown communication networks served to both disseminate ideas but also to exclude outsiders from participation in the conversations about ideas. Clearly, or so it seems to me, a universal conversation about texts is a good or bad thing based on the texts under consideration. A universal discussion of Harry Potter is a recipe for disaster; while a transparent and permeable networked conversation about, say, Graeber's work on debt is a step in the right direction. Which is another long-winded and pedantic way of saying I agree with your last point but disagree with your historical claims.
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