The Kindle and Cultural Display
I’ve said before that thought I love my Kindle, it deprives me of the signaling fun that comes along with reading traditional books. I’m going through Infinite Jest, as are a lot of people this summer, but I can’t visibly display the book on the Metro or around my house. James Wolcott has a good essay on this:
Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices. As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects—digitize and dematerialize—we approach a Star Trek future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles. Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. The Barnes & Noble bookstore, with its coffee bar and authors’ readings, could go the way of Blockbuster as an iconic institution, depriving readers of the opportunity to mingle with their own kind and paw through magazines for free. Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
Now I’m pretty sure the world will survive this transition. But it’ll be interesting to see how it happens. I note that one thing a lot of people, myself included, sometimes do is use the Adium feature that automatically sets your IM chat status to the title and artist of the song currently playing on your iTunes. One way to think about that is as a substitute for the old game of visually displaying the physical records or CDs you own in your house. It’s a way to turn your music consumption into something quasi-public. Perhaps reading books in groups and writing blogs about what you’re reading will be the new way to share your cultural consumption with the world.
46 Responses to “The Kindle and Cultural Display”
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July 12th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
It seems to me that if a book or piece of music affects (changes) one intellectually or emotionally, the best way to express that is to manifest that change through one’s outward behavior, not to carry the book around and hope other people will notice.
I will say, once again, that my sympathies toward the declining world of print are for the actual things signified, rather than the signifiers thereof.
July 12th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Meh. Lame gadgets for rich people.
July 12th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
It’s not that the Kindle doesn’t mark you in a cultural display — my Sony Reader has been a conversation piece a few times — but that the mark’s significance is different. Calling Henry Jenkins and danah boyd!!
July 12th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I’m actually an extremely rare type: I like reading a lot, but I dislike how books look in my apartment. I just think a shelf full of books is a lot of dense visual clutter, and a New York apartment could always use less clutter. Many of my friends find this opinion nothing short of appalling.
I’ve still got the books though. Not really interested in a Kindle yet.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
This reminds me of people who get tattoos to demonstrate how non-superficial they are. Well, getting something permanently engraved on your body as a means to distinguish yourself is the most superficial act one could do!
Likewise, carrying around books so people can see how deep and thoughtful you are is about the shallowest way one could attempt to appear deep and thoughtful!
/not meant as a critique against tattoos, I don’t care if you have one or not and some are pretty darn cool
July 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Books aren’t going anywhere. A few people will keep their Kindle, but they’ll never go fully mainstream.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I’d always thought the idea of reading a book was reading the book, not to provide branding or decoration.
I’ve become fond of reading on an ipod touch when traveling. All the content and none of the weight.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
@lfv–As it happens, there seems to be a mini-trend right now (at least among 20-something hipsters in New York) of getting extensive literary passages tattooed on oneself. Really.
The other night in a Williamsburg bar I saw a girl in with an entire passage from “On The Road” (”the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” and about five hundred words after that) tattooed in a 14-point typewriter font on her back. I’m not going to stoop to making the obvious jokes.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
I’ve said before that thought I love my Kindle, it deprives me of the signaling fun that comes along with reading traditional books.
How the flying fuck do you get away with calling yourself a progressive?
You’re glorifying in the use of a toy for rich people, while at the same time lamenting the demise of your ability to demonstrate your intellectual superiority over other riders on the Metro or, say, the Lexington Ave Express, most of whom are exhausted poor people en route to terrible jobs.
I think you just provided a great explanation of why the Democrats have been horrendous at helping the mass of people after their crushing electoral success. Jesus H. Christ.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
the books + social networking site goodreads (which also has a facebook app so it can show up in your facebook feed) is the perfect solution to this “problem”. everyone can see what everyone else is reading even more effectively than the old days when you were hefting a physical book around.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I really want Matt to frame this using Adorno.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
One day Amazon will stop supporting it’s proprietary format and you’ll find out you don’t own books or their content but a bunch of unsupported code. Then your Kindle will culturally signify ‘Kick me, I’m a sucker!’ to the world.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I see a lot of signaling going on at the Starbucks on my street. We have a running joke about giving awards to the best signaler. The all time winner was a very cute guy deeply into his copy of “A Guide to the Neurosurgery Board Review”
July 12th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
As others have said, I don’t trust that I’ll actually be able to read whats on it in 5, 10, or 20 years, which is why I only buy work-related IT books for my Kindle. Since I know that I wont ever want to read 95+% of them in even 2-3 years, I don’t mind the thought that I might lose them all eventually. That, and they tend to be bulky and take up lots of space that I can use to store the books that I might want to come back to in the future…
July 12th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
On the flip side, it wouldn’t surprise if the Kindle does wonders for the sales of trashy novels. Safe to read on the Metro! I expect they’ll eventually add the old ’spreadsheet’ function: like the image of a spreadsheet you can flash up on your screen when the boss comes strolling by your cubicle, just by hitting a button you can make a page from A La Recherche du Temps Perdu pop up (temporarily) when someone you respect walks by you and your Kindle.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Technology can address this pretty easily (and cheaply).
One of the future Kindles can have a dual screen on the back, which displays the cover of the book you are reading while you are reading it.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
9: It’s pretty pathetic, true. But I don’t think that’s the problem with the Democratic party.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
The writer Brian O’Nolan (aka Flann O’Brien, aka Myles naGopaleen) wrote a series of columns for the Irish Times about employing professional book handlers for the uncultured rich who wanted to furnish their homes with libraries suggesting intellect and sensibility, but didn’t want to be found out by visitors who noticed that the pages were uncut or the spines uncracked. For “le traitement superbe”, the book-handlers would make annotations, forge inscriptions, and include tickets from the “right” theatres as bookmarks.
(Alex Massie wrote about it a while back.)
Book jackets and covers are a relatively recent phenomenon: for most of the history of print, people bought their books in unbound sheets and had their bookbinder bind them to fit in with the rest of the library. Even now, there’s a distinction between the covers of “serious” and “popular” books — particularly in non-Anglo cultures.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
the best way to express that is to manifest that change through one’s outward behavior, not to carry the book around and hope other people will notice.
There are a few books that have affected me deeply, but I have no idea whatsoever how that should manifest itself in my “outward behaviour” – how do you translate the Critique of Judgement, The Phenomenology of Mind or The Man Without Qualities into “behaviour”?
And as for showing off (which I obviously just did, tsk tsk), since there are few societal gratifications for spending the best years of your life on the sisyphean task of making your way through the intellectual and literary tradition, I think a little bit of showing off here and there is perfectly benign and acceptable.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
So, in short, when you see a fine-ass bespectacled bookworm-looking broad on the Red Line now, you can no longer wave around your Infinite Jest jacket? Sensing a business opportunity here — disposable book-branded Kindle covers.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
James Gary Says:
July 12th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
@lfv–As it happens, there seems to be a mini-trend right now (at least among 20-something hipsters in New York) of getting extensive literary passages tattooed on oneself. Really.
The other night in a Williamsburg bar I saw a girl in with an entire passage from “On The Road” (”the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” and about five hundred words after that) tattooed in a 14-point typewriter font on her back. I’m not going to stoop to making the obvious jokes.
Yikes!
If you’re going to get a 500 word passage tattooed on your back, don’t pick something so pedestrian and obvious!
How long until we see disaffected college objectivists with Galt’s speech on their back?
July 12th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Incredible, isn’t it? 200+ years since the Industrial Revolution and we still have twits like James Wolcott imagining that the trajectory of their young adult lives is the ONLY POSSIBLE AUTHENTIC such trajectory. I’m sorry Matt, this is not a good essay — this is an essay by a complete and utter moron.
I mean, Christ, don’t you think they were saying this 100 years ago: “Teenagers who first hear music on an Edison invented the cylindrical phonograph record will forfeit the smells, the grandeur, the public intimacy of having first heard that music in a concert hall”.
At the very same time that James Wolcott is whining about this, there are services (on the internet, this new invention Wolcott will probably hate because it changes the world from what he grew up in in 1970) like LibraryThing that are devoted to letting you tell the world in excruciating detail your reading habits.
And look at Matt’s very followup to the block quote — “I’ll use Adium to tell the world what I’m listening to on iTunes”. Fine products from the 1950s there!
We’ve had a LONG LONG history now of technology changing the world, and, you know what, it turns out that people cope with these changes and figure out how to use the new technology to accommodate basic human needs. OK, if you are writing about the worrying future and what it portends in 1800 we can cut you some slack, it’s not clear how things will turn out. When you’re writing the same damn thing in 2009, what is there to say? You’re clearly so stupid, so stupid beyond belief, so utterly clueless about the world around you and what has happened in your own time, that your opinions have ZERO value to anyone.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Some hopeful guy wrote in his Amazon review of the math text Introduction to Smooth Manifolds:
Since this book is so large, and it says it’s a graduate math book right on the cover, I like to take it out with me when I go out on the town. I find it’s a great ice breaker with the ladies. I only wish it was the nice burnt orange of the newer springer books.
A Kindle would surely ruin his chances.
July 12th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Maybe a middle-aged fashionista like Wolcot would like the Kindle better if it featured a screensaver with the cover of the most recently read book. Or a little LCD display on the back of it that scrolls “Now Reading: Infinite Jest Author: David Foster Wallace”.
July 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
LibraryThing is cool but for it to work the way Big Signifier Matt is talking about you’d have to accept making friends and/or getting laid through the internet as the norm instead of in meatspace, i.e. meeting people at bars or in the grocery store or in the accounting department at work. He’s bemoaning the lack of meatspace signifiers which suggests there is still something to the serendipitous chemistry of just randomly meeting new people in the flesh and showing off your smarty pants new book.
Re: the ‘On the Road’ grrl, it would be cool if that woman with the passage tattooed on her back was like ‘The Illustrated Man’ in that Ray Bradbury short story and could change the content of the tatooed passage through some kind of magic. A human Kindle!
July 12th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
People will continue to want to engage in this signaling behavior, so my guess is that as the media devices themselves become more electronic, small and invisible, people will expand their use of buttons, badges, stickers, tee shirts, buckles, caps etc. to advertise what they are reading and listening too.
July 12th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
In the future, pieces of flair won’t be optional.
July 12th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
What is happening is that people exchange the cards for the readers so they can read (and discuss) books they have recommended to each other. It’s a great thing, IMO, for traveling especially.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Good god, this is the second time you’ve whined about this. You aren’t poverty-stricken. If you want people on the subway to marvel at how you’re reading Infinite Jest, go to a bookstore and buy the thing. And quit whining about it.
July 12th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Buying CDs is old-fashioned? Then I’m old-fashioned, I guess. The only music I’ve ever bought on iTunes is stuff unavailable on CD. And even then, there’s a big chunk of music I’ve lost in the course of computer turnover and can’t download again unless I pony up more money.
July 12th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Yglesias says he is “going through” Infinite Jest, which puts it about right. It’s not really a novel one reads.
July 13th, 2009 at 7:31 am
I take it very few of you actually *read* the Wolcott piece, or even took time to try to understand what MY was talking about.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:41 am
The advantage of physical books isn’t just in communicating with others, but in maintaining one’s own memory of the books. I have a far better memory of the books in my offices at home and at work than I have of the books I borrowed or gave away. Human memory is more like RAM than a hard disk, periodically needing to be refreshed. Looking at the spine of a book triggers the neural paths laid down when I first read the book, reinforcing the memories and making them more accessible.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Maynard Handley (#22), your post says more about you than about Yglesias. And what it says is not good.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:52 am
“We’ve had a LONG LONG history now of technology changing the world, and, you know what, it turns out that people cope with these changes and figure out how to use the new technology to accommodate basic human needs.”
I think there’s a few million corpses from the 20th century that might want to quibble with you about how technologies like the machine gun, atom bomb and poison gas accomodated “basic human needs”.
Mike
July 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am
eInk is a persistent display. If you really must be ostentatious about your reading material, why can’t you just leave an image of the cover displayed when you’re not reading?
Of course, if you really want to show off how smart you are, you shouldn’t be hauling around a Kindle. All that does is shout out loud to all who see you: “Look at me! I can’t buy books from anyone but Amazon.”
It certainly is a labor, showing off.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Some hopeful guy wrote in his Amazon review of the math text Introduction to Smooth Manifolds
That reminds me of how back when I was an undergrad at Caltech the text for an Abstract Algebra class that Math majors typically took sometime around their sophomore year was a hardcover book with the unhelpful title Algebra. So there you’d be, learning all sorts of mind-bending abstract stuff, and looking like someone taking a remedial class at Pasadena City College.
In practice this was not really much of a problem, since Caltech undergrads rarely left campus, and if they did, they likely wouldn’t be picking up girls anyway.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Puh-lease. The Kindle is all about cultural signaling. For instance, the guy next to me on the treadmill reading his New York Times on his Kindle is totally signaling that he is a pretentious douchebag.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
One flash in the pan concept for sharing one’s effete tastes is Shelfari, a social site for showing off what you’ve read.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
I don’t get why using a Kindle isn’t also an interesting accessory. Certainly, it would inspire a lot of curiosity among people, unlike a print book which everyone has seen before. There’s status in using new technology as well – seems fairly obvious.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
None of you have addressed the key question — How the hell do you read IJ, a book that requires you to constantly refer to the endnotes, on a Kindle without getting seasick?
July 14th, 2009 at 1:17 am
[...] occasionally jealous when I see someone reading a book I’ve been wanting to get my hands on. Like Matt Yglesias, I will occasionally change my Adium or gchat status to let people know what I’m listening [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 4:41 am
To elaborate on what I said upthread, Maynard: That seems like a philosophical grand gesture, a bold swipe of Ockham’s razor.
But think of what it means. The next time you read some argument that seems to make sense, you won’t know whether it makes sense unless you know that the author is totally against printed books. That’s the corner you’ve painted yourself into, Maynard. Now stay there till it’s dry.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
As any Trekkie will tell you, dead-tree books still exist in the 23rd and 24th centuries. Watch Wrath of Khan if you don’t believe me. Spock gives Kirk A Tale of Two Cities for his birthday.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I’m reading Infinite Jest as well, and, well, to start with, it’s definitely weighing down my purse during my commute. Be glad you’re reading it on Kindle. But I was waiting for the metro today, and two interns came up and started talking to me about the book (something about if I was trying to get a world record for reading the largest book. interns are funny). I’m really enjoying the book, and have been raving about it to my friends since I picked it up, so it was lovely to have someone just randomly see my reading it and start talking about it. The only problem is that people ask me what the book is about, and, although I know the back cover says it is about entertainment and such, I can’t for the life of me come up with an adequate explanation…
July 14th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
I don’t get the “device for rich people” comments. I can only imagine that you wouldn’t use it much and that’s how you come to this conclusion.
If you purchase 20 books, you break even. That’s not counting any of the publications that are much cheaper on the kindle or free use of the internet. There are also thousands of free books. You can find them online, but then you’d have to read them on your computer. Print copies will set you back $3-$10 each.