Here’s looking at you, for ever, in e-world
Andrew Sullivan
11 June 2006
The great myth of new media is that they take us into the future. It’s a good selling point, of course. Blogs have begun to transform journalism, and newspapers will increasingly exist online in ways they never have before. Podcasting is indeed going to supplement radio. Online movies in spanking-new home entertainment systems may well kill off cinemas. Online television is already diminishing the clout of satellite and cable, just as the latter helped decimate the power of big networks.
In all of this we’re constantly seeing new products in new ways and by new methods. And the pace of it is so fast we are as aware of living on the brink of the future as we have ever been.
And yet in practice something else has happened with all this newness: something more surprising but just as significant. The technology of the future has managed to open up the past in ways few foresaw. It has made what was once history present again; it has enabled anyone to tap into bygone days with an ease once reserved for university dons in vast and meticulously organised libraries. Everything old is new again — and online.
Here’s one simple example of what I mean. A decade or so ago I remember calling up the sub-editors of this paper in the dead of night worrying about an error I thought I might have made in a column. The breezy cockney voice on the other end of the phone reassured me: “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s fish and chips now, mate.”
And so it was. For most of western civilisation a journalist’s daily musings would very soon become transparent with the grease off a battered cod or pulped into non-existence. Today every comma is stored, cached, Googled and rendered as accessible now as it was when it was first published.
To find an old column or an article that was printed a while back you used to have to find a good university library and spend hours scanning through microfiched pages. Most sane people couldn’t be bothered. Now anyone can Google anything; and as more and more newspaper archives are slowly scanned and placed online the past opens up again as an eternal digital present.
That column from a decade ago? Two right-clicks and you have it. That essay from the 1950s? Increasingly you’ll be able to track it down in a jiffy.
Outsourced serfs will eventually be able to scan in and copy newspapers from decades or even centuries past, and they’ll be as available as today’s editions to anyone with a modem and a sense of curiosity. The New Republic, to take a single example, is now busy putting many of Walter Lippman’s old essays back online. They still own the copyright, so why not?
He’s as good as anyone writing today and, at times, curiously clarifying. Want to see the parallels between journalism in the Vietnam era and in the Iraq war? In the past you’d need a research assistant and a few weeks. Today? More and more it’s a cinch.
The process does not of course have the nostalgic feel of poring over the old magazine itself: the ancient fonts, the funny advertisements, the faded yellowing paper. But it’s a lot easier and quicker. And the prose never changes.
What’s true of journalism is now increasingly true in other media as well. I’ve largely given up going to cinemas for “grumpy old men” reasons. My other half and I subscribe to a mail-in DVD service called Netflix that, for a modest subscription rate, allows us to compile online a queue of films we want to see and posts us up to five movies at any one time.
When you’ve seen one, you put it right back in the same envelope, send it back and within a day or so the next one in your queue arrives.
But here’s the real joy of it: there are more than 60,000 titles to choose from. They go back decades: old treasures you’d find only in the most arcane video rental stores are now available at the click of a mouse and in your DVD player in a few days.
Thanks to the newest technologies, I can now see the oldest films; movies I would never have known existed, let alone watched and enjoyed. I can search through a director’s entire work and discover a gem that would previously have passed me by. That can lead me in turn to an actor I hadn’t heard of. A couple more minutes online and I can order up his other performances. The stars of the 1940s are suddenly hot again.
Now the real treasure trove: out-of-print books. Google is currently engaged in scanning vast quantities of books from the past, compiling a vast archive of historical writing available online.
For many titles the copyrights are long gone, but the books themselves lie alone and unread in dusty library stacks, waiting for some wandering student or eccentric to pick them up. If the books were lucky in the recent past, someone with an afternoon to spare might have stumbled across an old edition in a second-hand bookshop. But all that could soon change.
By scanning the contents of countless books online, and by allowing readers to search for topics or words, or print out chapters or even just paragraphs, Google will soon unleash an entire ancient dust-covered printed archive on an unblinking world. Words written decades ago will appear in the same pixels as someone’s blog-post of 10 minutes ago. “Out of print” could become a meaningless phrase.
The only thing lacking of course is the book itself: that wonderfully efficient package of paper and binding that you can pick up and take anywhere. Who wants to read an old novel on a screen? But that too may change. Print-on-demand technology increasingly allows books to be printed individually at lower and lower costs. Companies could easily find a niche turning Google discoveries into readable form and sending them to you by mail.
We could even return to those wonderful old generic Penguin paperback covers: the same design for every book. But this time searchable in advance and available for peanuts. Netboox: is it the next idea waiting to happen? These used to be daydreams. Nobody who has experienced the information revolution of the past two decades could say that now. And so old fogies and the high-tech can finally reach an accommodation. Cherish, lament and rhapsodise the good old days — but right-click to get there. You have no idea what you might find.
