You may be a Mac, but...

In Kathleen Fitzpatrick's talk at the UM library on Thursday the 18th, she laid out what amounts to an introduction to the more extensive work done in her most recent project, Planned Obsolescence, a project that both tries to explain what changes are taking place and some that should take place in the world of scholarly publishing. The online version of Planned Obsolescence is an admirable document both in the issues it takes on (though I should admit now that I have significant concerns over what she says) and how it engages with them. I'll have more to say about the document itself at a later date, but I want to get into a concern Fitzpatrick raises over the obsolescence of readers and formats that produced some of the earliest hypertext novels like Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden.



Fitzpatrick mentioned the fact that current versions of the Mac OS (Snow Leopard - rawr!) no longer offer support for the "classic" Mac OS (i.e. from the pre-UNIX days) applications, meaning that hypertext documents written using Storyscape, Eastgate's "hypertext writing environment," can no longer be viewed by Mac users running OS 10.4 or later, even though they possess a license for said document.  Of course, if you use a PC, none of this silliness really affects you.

In my previous post, I quoted Jerome McGann's statement from The Scholar's Art about the invisibility of material media, but I did not quite go into the ramifications of what it might mean to read the materiality of a text or the anxiety that might result from constantly keeping materialist concerns in mind when, really, all you want to do is read a damn book (or newspaper or pamphlet or whatever).  Rather then delve into esoterica, as is my wont, the anxiety of the materiality of texts can best be explained by Apple's recent PC vs. Mac commercials.  Their brilliance lies in the way they tap into people's anxiety (even so-called power users') about personal computers and the degree of acumen they, at least in the early days, seemed to demand in order to simply function properly.  I say this, after just having spent the better part of a Wednesday booting my laptop in Safe Mode and individually deleting registry keys left over from a particularly annoying (but altogether somewhat benign) piece of malware I'd gotten from, well, who knows where.  This commercial in particular emphasizes everything people hate about buying a new PC and how the kind people at Mac have graciously taken the time to instill their machines with an ease of immediate use that is unprecedented in personal computing technology.

The problem with treating anxiety is how you have to go about it: by largely taking control away from the person who suffers by inhibiting their conscious mind and its underlying neurochemistry.  Note: my knowledge of psychopharmacology is about a decade old now, but the most common class of anxiolytics (anti-anxiety medications), Benzodiazepines (like Xanax and Valium), are sedatives and at extremely high dosages can become psychotropic.  I don't want to press this point too far but in treating anxiety, be it with drugs or mass media (of course, some would argue "same thing"), you ever so subtly alter your consciousness.  All of the problems of viruses, backwards compatibility, usability, and portability remain--you now simply filter them out or, rather, they are filtered out for you.

So, you may be a Mac, and I hasten to mention your computer preferences ultimately reflect very little, but your documents aren't.  And PC users don't get to act smug here, because what I'm trying to say is that digital documents aren't anything: aren't PC, aren't Mac, aren't Linux, aren't Commodore, etc.  They are markup, and whatever operating system you choose to use has to decode and "read" them.  In the earlier days (though not the earliest) of PC use (back when that acronym meant "personal computer" and not "machine that runs Windows"), back when to even run Windows you had to enter a command into an MS-DOS prompt, a certain amount of knowledge (or at least awareness) of how one interfaces--how one moves from machine language to some "end result"--was part and parcel of using a computer in the first place.  This is, strangely, analogous to the shift in textual consciousness (as I'm calling it now; hopefully I can think of something better) that took place with "printed" texts.

Ancient authors show a marked awareness of how books were produced, as "reading" handwritten documents largely requires an understanding of how they were written.  In the Roman world lectores ("readers") were either slaves or freedman professionals whose job it was to read texts aloud to their wealthy masters.  What the standardization of print did was to ease the burden of reading text, to remove the anxiety of the technologies of textual production in one of the boldest egalitarian gestures of the modern world.  But in order to relieve that anxiety, it had to render them invisible to the public eye by sequestering them.  This might be acceptable to one such as myself, if the problems of formatting and conversion did not persist in the precisely the same way the problems of variance of print also persisted and continue to.

So, now that I've laid a bit of foundation, next time I will deal more extensively with the bifurcation of digital documents and with the great possibilities such a bifurcation presents in terms of portability but also the problems of backwards compatibility and "obsolescence."

As always, should you, o dear reader, have any suggestions for topics or particular objects to examine, feel free to email us at libralthinking@gmail.com.