On cleaning my bookshelves and extending Martin Buber in the digital age

August 23 2011, 11:23 PM  by Bernie Michalik
I cleaned and rearranged my bookshelves today and yesterday. It took quite
some time, but despite the hard work, it was also a small celebration. I
had to think about my books, where they should go, how they should be
arranged, which ones should be culled. I also rediscovered a lot of books
that I forgot about. Quite a few, including Martin Buber's I and Thou.

In Buber's book, he talks about the difference between the I-It
relationship we have with things and the I-Thou relationship we should have
with people. We should have relationships with people that transcends those
we have with things, argues Buber, for things are a means to an end while
people are an end in themselves. There is much more to his philosophy than
my glib summary, but you can see the hierarchy and why it exists.

There is another relationship we have in the digital age. I call it I-Bit.
I though of this as I pulled out my Kobo reader. I have over 100 books on
it, none of them with any physical presence. The only relationship I have
is with the Kobo, which I like. However, going through my books, I could
recall when I read them, where I bought them, who I talked to about them. I
don't write in the margins, but I found scraps of paper in some that were
memory touchstones. There is a signifigant emotional and intellectual
investment in the relationship that I have with my physical books. The I-It
relationship I have with my books transcends the I-bit relationship I have
with my eBooks.

The same hold true for other digital media. I have mix tapes from decades
ago that mean a lot to me. I can see the handwriting of my friends that
made them. I can recall talking about them. Same with LPs I have or CDs.

It's not that I am indifferent to digital media. But the relationship that
I have with it is lesser than analog media. That's especially true when the
analog media is well made or rare. We attribute things with qualities we do
not attribute to digital media. Those qualities are transformative to us.
In a way, as we become more digital creatures, the relationship with the
physical world may become more precious to us. It would be a shame to lose
that as we increasingly digitize things. The digital representation is a
shadow of the real thing it was derived from.

Thanks for reading this.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.

89 views and 2 responses

  • Aug 24 2011, 6:33 AM
    Aaron Kim (Facebook) responded:
    Hey Bernie,

    I think I mentioned that to you already: I like your posterous posts much better than your SPIK posts. Not that the latter are not good: they are excellent and very interesting. But I feel that your posterous posts are more like you, not the editorialized you.

    Regarding this post: I have the same feeling every time I go back to my mom's place and do some archeological work. I feel sentimentally attached to the sensory experience of objects that played a role in early phase of my life.

    I think 2 things are at play here. First, we do have a more complete experience with objects than their digital equivalents: tact, smell, visual. I think this gap will be minimized in the long term: digital representations may add variations of tact, smell and visual sensations once technology catches up (maybe not in our lifetime). I would argue that they can give you even more than the physical goods we have today, but our generation will not see them as equivalents, no matter how sophisticated they can be. Future generations might.

    The other thing is nostalgia about anything past: I bet that as populations moved from rural to urban, people missed the farm environment. We can even go further: as we left hunting to cultivate the fields, people likely missed the adventure and the adrenaline of chasing our food. But we still moved to new things, as the benefits were bigger than the disadvantages. I think that 20 years from now, you may find your old Kobo reader when cleaning your bookshelves again, and miss the time you could just read that black/white/grayish screen with buttons, from the time when digital books still tried to mimic the physical copies with pages, and bookmarks, and written text only.

  • Aug 24 2011, 10:17 PM
    Bernie Michalik responded:
    Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Aaron. I believe that your relationship with things will have a deeper meaning, but this will be shown over time. In 20 years my thought may seem odd. Just like phone booths will be odd and no one will think them special. My feelings may be like those of horse owners at the dawn of the automobile age