Virtual Objecthood

This past week I attended a guest lecture by Lawrence Weschler, a writer and media theorist. He's the author of Everything that Rises, an art history book of sorts that builds connections between modern media and classical art. His talk was primarily about books, and their potential demise due to digital conversion. He did a wonderful job weaving together scholarly quotes and delicate metaphors in cause of 'real' books, but as a web developer and game designer, I couldn't help but feel a little defensive. That said, he was very persuasive. By the end of the talk, I was about ready to run home and rub my first edition copy of Catcher in the Rye all over my face.

He pointed out, a number of times, the importance books play in our lives, how important his personal library of books is to him, even coffee table books. Most of use have book collections, some for reading, some for reference, but most of them just because. The question is then, why books are important to us? And more importantly, will they be as important to our children? I think the answer is no, and I'll explain why. First though, a bit more on Weschler and technology.

At the start of the talk, Weschler made it very clear 'he loves the internet' -- but I felt this might be a passion of convenience. He demonstrated his love by showing us cool videos he had found online. Yeah, videos are cool, but the passive absorption of media is not what it's about. At least not any more. I would have showed everyone this to blow they minds. The audience was generally on the older (read: elderly) side, and there was a strong vibe of distrust in the digital. During the Q&A a gentleman made the analogy asserting that reading from a physical book and reading text on screen are as different as live and recorded music. Weschler refined the idea, probing whether the difference really boils down to a matter of analog vs. digital. Everyone nodded knowingly.

What they didn't get is that the limitations of digital media, be it recorded music or otherwise, lie not in the technology but in its current implementation. Yes, there is no comparing an MP3 to an LP. The warmth, the highs, the lows, are all stripped away in the evil digital conversion. Most MP3s suck in quality because they are compressed to fit by the 1000s onto relatively small storage devices. It's now very possible to listen to digital recordings with fidelity beyond what human hearing can discern. 10 years from now every digital song file will be of a quality so high that the romantic notion of analog recordings having more 'soul' will be done. The technology is no longer the limitation.

The same might be true of books... OK, using the Kindle (great as it may be) is nothing like reading a book. It doesn't 'embrace you', as Weschler put it, like a well loved text can. But what if it did? Imagine a perfect recreation of your favorite book, the feel, the weight, the smell... but with a touch of a button the content inside could transform to any source you wanted. Would you throw out your book collection then? My guess is no, so I don't think our attachment to physical books is based in the experience of reading them.

We place tremendous value on our books because they are one of the many ways people in our culture create a self identity. No, it's not about showing off your bookshelf to friends, it's about the process of identification we go through when we read a good book. The funny feeling that in some way 'this book was written for me'. In many ways we experience a sort of union with the physical book, forming an association that can last a lifetime. It's a testament to the power of an excellent book, but even more so to our need externalize our self identity. If you're reading a digital book, even a smelly leather bound simulacra, where does the reader place that important feeling of identification? If you're someone whose existence is based in the physical world, the answer is no where. You're stuck. I think this fear of loss of identity might be behind our romantic attachment to books. Not to mention all those CDs you have boxed up in the basement. In a way, we fear losing a part of ourselves, and proof of our existence.

Thanks in part to video games, future generations might not even care. As our culture and our identities become increasingly virtual, physical objects may lose their seemingly intrinsic value. This is already occurring as people, young people especially, are placing greater and greater importance on virtual experience (facebook, twitter, video games). From an objective standpoint there is no reason a 'real' book is any more or less valuable than a virtual representation of one. You might argue: a virtual item has no value because you can just 'poof' it in and out of existence. Realness, like most everything, is relative. Isn't that book your grandfather gave you a little more real than a paperback that magically appears at your door a few days after 'poofing' it on Amazon.com?

Consider the World of Warcraft players who bid on, and pay real money for virtual identities and objects ($9000 in one case). While it might be hard to understand as an outsider, for them the leap to virtual objecthood has already happened. I won't be surprised if this trend begins to seriously extend beyond the borders of Azeroth.

How then to we proceed? Younger generations will likely not cherish books with the same unconditional attachment Weschler exhibited. Culturally (for older generations in particular) tangible records of media, like books, records, even CDs, serve a dual purpose. Yes, to be experienced when we want, but more importantly to serve as long lasting extensions of ourselves. Like I said, proof of our existence.

Long after you die, your books, your things will likely live on in your absence. Right? What about your virtual self, your facebook profile, your amazon account? Will you pass them on to your children? Our perception is that these digital ephemera are weak; that a power outage, or a computer virus might wipe them away in an instant. Physical objects give us a sense of permanence, relative indestructibility, but nothing is indestructible and permanence is relative. My home bookshelf is more likely to go up in flames than this blog is to vanish from Google's servers.

Is our attachment to books then just a matter of misconceptions about technology and permanence? A grim conclusion I know. Not all is lost though, real and digital objecthood are certainly not mutually exclusive. Personally I envision myself supplementing my real book collection with digital entries, just as I have done with my music collection. The future of physical books is really in our hands, as a 24 year old American, mine in particular. So don't be afraid to use a Kindle, if not today, then sometime in the future when the digital experience is improved further. If you care about real books (whatever your reason) keep building your collection and giving them to others. If people keep buying books, publishers will keep producing them, otherwise we all may have to settle for virtual bookshelves.