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From the ‘Order of the Book’
to a digital order?
Western culture is a mediated culture. Mediums, more than direct
personal experience, define people’s world picture. Starting with
images in prehistory, mediation took off in earnest with the invention
of writing. It accelerated as first print, and then new medial
forms such as photography, film, radio, and television were invented
at ever shorter intervals. In such a mediated culture, medial change
has an enormous social impact. Already the current digital developments
are showing to be no less momentous than those of the
epoch-making historical changes that preceded them.
Books, newspapers, periodicals, and any number of old and new
text formats are now finding digital form at a rapid, even exponential,
rate.1 Paradoxically, text is both the first and the last of the medial
modes that is to go digital. It was the first in the sense that text was
the first modality after numbers to become computable in the 1950s.
Since then digital texts have become available in vast quantities, both
digitised analogue texts and texts that did not exist in analogue form
before, notably Web pages. At the same time – and this is the paradox
– paper books, newspapers, periodicals, and other products of the printing press continue to persist in vast quantities. While digital photography, digital video, and digital music are now the norm,
the entire analogue world of printing, bookshops, and libraries still largely continues as of old.