Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, well-written and on point
Review: ...Our complicated relationship with documents--everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias--is the subject of David Levy's "Scrolling Forward."

Levy, a doctoral computer scientist and calligrapher, is well placed to compare the old and new. His book is organized around broad subjects--reading, writing and the like--but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the "this reminds me of that" principle, than according to something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.

The fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes toward digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia--George P. Landow's "Hypertext" and Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space"--declared that, thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed and linear thinking was passe.

They were widely praised within academic circles and provoked defenders such as Sven Birkerts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.

First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: We might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, "Scrolling Forward" begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but with a deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out to draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies.

"Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." It takes a village to make a document.

Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, Web browsers gave readers direct access to digital works. This last and most-publicized step was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole print versus digital debate seems irrelevant.

The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing.

Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations ... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letter forms on a piece of vellum." This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It is to say, however, that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: They have to be created in the social world and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy wants us to recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good--the way we read, organize our thoughts and create order in our intellectual worlds.

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: It's too bad this book is cloaked in an ugly and uninspired jacket because David Levy is a very smart and insightful writer who readers should be paying attention to. A former researcher at the famous Xerox/PARC, Levy considers the notion of a document -- everything from a Gutenberg Bible to a PDF file and beyond -- in a way that I think is comparable to but ultimately deeper than the work of Sven Birkerts, Alberto Manguel, and Steven Johnson. It's the kind of basic issue that gets ignored as we (and the marketplace) try to sort out how information and storytelling will continue to get transmitted from generation to generation, but as the big decisions get made in the near future, it's the sort of voice we need to listen to: a voice with both extreme technological training and a deep appreciation of what has made ink and paper a valuable medium for so long. To be sure, Levy could have used a good editor to discipline or perhaps better explain some of the occasional loose thinking in SCROLLING FORWARD, and the fact that the book is so clunkily designed inside and out is not encouraging for the future of the book -- if publishers don't realize these are important issues, especially with a book like this, who will? -- but anyone who's concerned with the present and future of books needs to PAY ATTENTION to Mr. Levy and his thoughtful discourse on documents.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating survey of the future of documents
Review: Scrolling Forward is a very fine survey of the changing relationships between ordinary objects - in this case, documents - and modern digital influences. Writing, etiquette, and reading habits are being questioned and changed by new technologies and practices: this examines documents of all kinds, considering what is likely to change and what is/should be preserved in the Internet Age. A fascinating survey of the future of documents and their meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Is paper to disappear?
Review: The changing face of documents and images in the digital age is considered in a title which covers all kinds of documents and the changes they face from the digital world; from recipes and letters to business memos and other writings. Is the book doomed? Is paper to disappear? Scrolling Forward: Making Sense Of Documents In The Digital Age by David M. Levy examines documents of all kinds as they relate to culture, history and technological changes.

Rating:
Summary: Important Reading
Review: This is an important book for everyone involved in the so-called "digital revolution" (which probably means all of us). David Levy tells us that as we look forward we must also pay close attention to the past. We must understand the meaning of documents independent of their fixity (or lack thereof) in the bits flowing across networks or ink on paper. Each chapter provides a thoroughly unique approach to helping you understand the cultural wrappings and the hidden implications of changes in the vehicle for fixity. The chapter about a deli receipt is especially magnificent! Read this book and think deeply about it.

Rating:
Summary: Documentation for our times
Review: This meditation on the changing role of documents in our lives is simply marvelous--wide-ranging, literate and even profound. Levy is no Luddite--quite to the contrary--but his essays here will change the way you think about the digital revolution. I might add that the prose is a model of what writing of this kind should be: modest, inviting and free of academic jargon or posturing. Nicely done.

Rating:
Summary: If you have too much time on your hands
Review: Working at PARC in research is something a lot of scientists might dream of. Lots of money and time to burn, living in the beautiful hills of Palo Alto. I used to run my bicycle around there in the morning. Mr. Levy had probably fun writing the book, but I did not have fun reading it. Obviously the author read a lot, knows a lot, but does not get to the point. The story gets lost in a mythical view about paper and information. I have to commit, I made it only to one third of the book, then I gave up, but hey, I don't work in research.
An excellent book about Information in the internet age: Die Bibliothek der Zukunft from Dieter E. Zimmer; unfortunately not in English;