Books, reading and academic boundaries

Photo, above: BJ945 Cuneiform by listentoreason, CC licensed

Centuries ago, says Clay Shirky:

“There was no point in educating people to read and write who weren’t also going to have access to books, and the people who had access to books were generally in centers of learning or churches. You couldn’t have mass literacy without also mass availability of things to read, which didn’t happen until after Gutenberg. So literacy went through this curious transition where it became more critical to society, and you could no longer make a living just by the ability to read and write.”

A similar transition is now happening for publishers, those who own the means of printing and distributing a written work. They must find a new way of making a living. Publishing has become the new literacy, says Shirky. Now that writers can publish their own work with little effort or expenditure, we readers must find new ways of determining the value of a piece of writing.

Clay Shirky sees broader implications in this cultural shift. Over the last several centuries mass communication and mass education produced a flood of information and activity in academia. To make the flood manageable, boundaries emerged between academic disciplines.

“These kinds of boundaries become really significant in two different areas. They become significant intellectually, and they also become significant for the development of things like tenure. So the really mundane [and the profound]… all get bound together tightly, and nobody inside the system can really imagine a change.”

Social media at a global scale, powerful search tools and other features of the Internet are lowering the disciplinary fences and changing the shape of academic inquiry:

“There are people who are willing to dive in and try stuff and are getting things done. But as people get better at things, we are starting to see the return of some kind of discipline–people specializing in different aspects of the service…

“But are the disciplinary models of the new medium going to be more like a network or are they going to be more like a series of silos? I’m going to bet on the network model, which is to say it’s likelier that disciplines in the world we’re entering are going to have not so much a canon that says, ‘This is the edge of what’s important,’ so much as, ‘This is the core of what we’re interested in wherever the currents come from.’”