Sauerberg: I mean what sparked off the collapse of Eastern Europe was the fax machine, wasn’t it? I mean that there were no boundaries.
DS: One thing I was curious about is the idea of hierarchy and authority. It’s interesting that hierarchy and authority were a defining feature of the pre-book era. So, if we’re restoring something, if we’re picking up where we left off, what are we looking at here?
Sauerberg: We are restoring the problem of authority. That is what we’re restoring. Medieval people had God in their minds all the time as kind of a guarantee, what they were told by the priests. Now what corresponds to it is the urge to authority.
DS: But isn’t that a little too clever? Before the parenthesis, society was defined by hierarchy.
Pettitt: It was defined by connections.
DS: But in the end the political structure was feudal. Now if you listen to people who don’t believe in the parenthesis but who believe in technological progress, they will tell you that the Internet revolution is about flattening hierarchy and the decomposition of authority. And yet the pre-parenthesis period was almost the opposite—it was all about hierarchy. What are we looking at from your perspective on what happens now that the parenthesis is closed
Sauerberg: New hierarchies will emerge. We’re looking for the urge for authority, the need for points of orientation.
Pettitt: And the authority of the book, the authority of the medium. In the parenthesis, the medium itself guaranteed authority because of its nature and solidness. This flattening out means that books are not more important than other forms of communication.
DS: So this is not necessarily a hopeful vision for the future. One thing about the book is that you can say that while it was an authoritative object, at least you can argue that was democratizing. Anyone, theoretically, could write a book. Martin Luther could, for instance.
Pettitt: He became a new authority.
Sauerberg: What Luther wrote was that whenever two or three people gather together, the Church was there. They could read about it. They could read about themselves. That was thanks to the book, to the spread of print.
DS: What Luther was saying sounds like what Internet advocates are saying today. The book there was a liberating thing.
Sauerberg: It was not as neat as all that. You cannot think of going back to something that was there. It’s rather kind of a structural thing. Are you familiar with the phenomenon of fan fiction? I invented a term some years back called the “unintended sequel”—that’s a new phenomenon in literature that people write on to establish canonical works. They write it in their own fashion, the way they want things to end up. So they add something. That is a new phenomenon that coincides with the closing of the parenthesis. Fan fiction is the phenomenon that people write on in large numbers of well-known books and do it in cyberspace alone. They never “publish.” They’re not intended for publication. It’s a ‘net thing and the one who leads that at the moment is Rowling and Harry Potter. There are, I think, at the last count more than 600,000 fan fiction contributions to the Harry Potter saga. And this is something that completely put out without any boundaries. It grows by its own energy, and people tell stories.
Pettitt: Which sounds pretty medieval to me because in the medieval period, the simple business of embroidering further on existing stories was their default mode. The existence of a story didn’t mean it was finished or completed. Anyone with a talent or the ability to contribute could rewrite bits or add material. What were they doing in between this event and that event or what were they doing before? There were prequels. What happened to them afterwards? There were sequels. It’s the norm of medieval storytelling that you take a story and you elaborate on it.
DS: And so the idea of authorship is now completely up for grabs. I was trying to assert the importance of authorship in the journalism field, but what you’re saying now is…
"I expect citizens would tend to rely on the most legitimate public officials for news, trusting especially what the White House sent their way."
So the folks at CJR would rely on President Bush's word? And Rush Limbaugh's listeners' Obama's?
People will listen to what they want to hear - those who already agree with them. The Balkinization of opinion will continue, and likely worsen. Legitimacy is irrelevant, and those caught making false statements - like Dan Rather - are held up as heroes.
There is literally not a single news source, right or left, that is trustworthy today. It's all about enforcing The Narrative. Perhaps we are all Homer after all?
#1 Posted by Jayat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 09:56 AM
This is nonsense on stilts. It's as if nothing happened before about 900 CE. The only reference to an earlier period is to Homer. In the ancient west alone, how about: public inscriptions of laws and edicts on stone, with punishments prescribed for anyone who moved or defaced them; private inscriptions, such as curses, on metal (ever heard the phrase 'aere perennius'?); the disputes about the authentic and correct texts of the dramatists, Homer, etc. amongst grammarians from the 3rd c. BCE, of those of the founders of the school amongst Epicureans from the 2nd c. BCE, and of those of Plato and Aristotle amongst Academics & Peripatetics from the 2nd c. CE; Galen's complaints in the 2nd c. CE that people were circulating early works of his without his permission, and works not his under his name; and the vast numbers of papyri that have survived, preserving everything from private letters to New Comedy (and Epicurus). We even have writing tablets from Vindolanda. The "orality" of ancient Greek culture and the transition to literacy has been a topos for decades. (This is off the top of my head, by the way. Nothing fancy.) On the other hand, early printed editions of books often present very different texts. The number of "ephemeral" political pamphlets produced in Britain from the 17th c. on is staggering. In short, these authors seem to be peddlng a piece of fiction; so it's probably appropriate that its title would assign it to the Ludlum Corpus.
#2 Posted by Cat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 02:04 PM