Publish and Perish: Immortality in the Library of Babel
The realm of speech is temporary. By the time we reach the end of a spoken sentence, each sound and syllable that preceded it is an irretrievable part of the past. As such, one unique property of the written word is its ability to preserve and immortalize an idea, a name, a person.
The ancient Greeks had myriad rhapsodists responsible for maintaining the oral histories of the people; but it is the works of Homer that we remember best, as his were the first to be written, ascribed, and preserved. In a typographic society, that which is written is remembered – all else perishes with time. Socrates recognized this and criticized the expansion of Greek literacy, claiming that it would engender a false sense of understanding and an over-reliance on decontextualized fragments of writing; and yet, we only know of his skepticism today because Plato, his student, disregarded his warnings, and instead, preserved them in writing for future generations.
Spenser’s Sonnet 75 illustrates this same conserving power of the written word. After repeatedly attempting to write his love’s name in the sand only to have it washed away by the ocean, the speaker is rebuked by his beloved with an existential reminder that all humans will “bee wiped out lykewize”. To this, the poet replies,
“Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize
to dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare eternize
and in the hevens wryte your glorious name.”
The poet’s feeble attempts to preserve his love’s name in the sand is a fitting image for the fragile nature of orality: each person’s life – along with its respective thoughts, loves, and spoken words – will inevitably be washed away, a victim of the persistent and devastating ebb of time. Unless, that is, those thoughts, loves, and words are preserved – in this case, through written composition. This, according to Spenser, is the key to immortality: To preserve in text is to grant eternal life.
There is truth in Spenser’s claim – at least, in a poetic sense. More than 500 years later, readers still know something of the “vertues” the poet sought to extol in his verse. Indeed, even beyond the scope of literature, much of our knowledge of the history of civilization has been pieced together from fragments of written text. The myths, stories, and heroes of the past are remembered today because someone preserved them – like the beloved in Spenser’s sonnet, they have been written in the heavens.
And yet, all of this raises a question: If the history of the written word has been tied to the immortalization of ideas, what becomes of this immortalization process as the written word expands in its scope? The shift from the ‘printed word’ of Spenser’s day to the emerging ‘digital word’ of today casts a shadow over print’s ability to preserve.
Consider the difference in processes: To “eternize” his love, Spenser’s verse had to endure the expensive, time and labor-intensive procedure of being arranged in moveable type, printed manually using a printing press, and distributed by hand to its audience. Today, anyone with computer access can create a blog about any subject – inane or profound – distribute it worldwide, and immortalize the content “in the hevens” instantly.
From a standpoint of temporal and financial efficiency, there can be little doubt that such developments in publishing process ought to be considered progress, but the democratization of “immortality” through the ‘digital word’ also raises some serious questions about the quantity and quality of human discourse in the digital age. For perspective: Google estimates that there have been 129 million books published in the history of human civilization. This is certainly a glut of information to be immortalized through publication – certainly more than would actually be useful, much less necessary. But compare that number – culled from centuries of written composition – with the number of active blogs in existence from just the last ten years: 152 million. Granted, it should not be surprising that a medium tends to grow exponentially larger when its costs are decreased and its accessibility is increased from its predecessors. But this exponential growth in output that is being preserved through the ‘digital word’ demands that we ask, What is the relationship between the increased quantity of information available and the relative quality of that information? Does the superfluity of information cheapen (or extinguish) the “immortality” that previously set the written text apart from speech? What becomes of human discourse when, in the name of democratization of information, all thoughts, without distinction, are granted eternal life?
Long before the advent of the blogosphere, Jorge Luis Borges explored some of these questions in his short story, La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel). Like many of Borges’s stories, The Library of Babel, is a sort of thought-experiment, a labyrinth. The narrator describes a library – a series of hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves, each filled with books, each containing 410 pages. These books are comprised of every possible ordering of the basic characters of written composition – letters, spaces, numbers, and punctuation marks. Because the books are filled with every possible combination of characters, this means that the library includes every great work of literature that has ever been written – indeed, every great would of literature that could ever be written – as well as countless books that are complete gibberish. As such, the inhabitants of Borges’s library spend their days wandering through the vast expanse, wading through a seemingly infinite number of nonsensical works, searching for the books that are coherent – the books that are worth reading. Many inhabitants search for the book whose characters will spell out an exhaustive index of the library itself to help explain the ostensibly meaningless ordering of the books that surround them.
And this is the problem that the inhabitants of this labyrinth face, the problem that drives many of them to an almost suicidal state of despondency: when faced with such a glut of information, it becomes impossible to know what is of value and what is not, what is worth preserving and what is not. Indeed, it even becomes impossible to determine what is truly gibberish and what is wisdom – after all, it could be that one of the books that appears to be nonsense is actually an encryption that could be decoded with the aid of another book in the library, and therefore, it ought to be preserved, no matter how remote the chances of this being true. What’s more, even if the inhabitants of this universe were to find the book they were looking for – the book that catalogues steps to navigating the library successfully – with so much information, it becomes impossible to know if what the book says is true. After all, in existence within the library, there must be books that claim that any other book in the library is true and books that claim that any other book is false. When all words are valued in equal weight, when all words are preserved, when all words are immortal, the words themselves become meaningless.
It would be easy to draw from this the conclusion that the Internet has destroyed human discourse, that the ‘digital word’ has tarnished the idyllic purity of written language. But such claims would be naive. The purity of the written word was tarnished long ago by the accumulation of centuries upon centuries of inept writers’ works. Furthermore, one could easily substitute a few words from this claim and find themselves making the same argument brought against the printing press for democratizing reading or the alphabet for democratizing literacy. Even Socrates, one of the most vocal opponents of the written word’s tendency to divorce communication from human presence, recognized the imperfections inherent within spoken dialogue. There is no ideal medium of communication or interaction – all exchanges will be tainted by human limitations in thought, symbol, and language.
But we must be careful not to let this realization make us passive: even if there is no ideal medium of communication, this does not mean that all media are neutral. Some media are resistant to correction in error; some media impose rigid, dehumanizing systems on their users; some media deceive users into believing that the deleterious effects that go along with their growth are entirely inevitable. But there is no inevitability as long as people are willing to contemplate what is happening around them. It is impossible for The Library of Babel to be constructed in an oral culture. It is impractical for it to be constructed in a written culture. But in a digital culture, the limitations of time, space, and resources are no longer obstacles. And the only defense is to be vigilant in distinguishing between error and insight, vulgarity and beauty, information and wisdom.
NOTE: I have written previously about how the Internet’s organization can present unique challenges to the teaching of research – particularly in the middle and secondary grades. These challenges are a modern day manifestation of the same frustrations that the inhabitants of Borges’s library experienced.
What do you think about the Great Library in ancient Alexandria as an analogue to the vast digital library accessible through the Internet? Both centralized as much information as possible, divorced at least initially from measures of value or meaning. The hundreds of thousands of scrolls in the Great Library no doubt contained great amounts of information that was completely false, superfluous, and/or meaningless, yet we’d likely agree that the Library facilitated significant progress in human knowledge and understanding.
It’s not unreasonable to foresee a future in which the information currently available online is lost to history like the scrolls at Alexandria. In the web’s brief history, already we’ve seen significant subsets of information lost permanently or relegated to obscurity (e.g. everything hosted on the Geocities domain). I can’t make any guesses about the comparatively eternal nature of a digital word in itself versus a printed word in itself.
Of course the printed word is just a medium; the word is only really preserved when subvocalized by a reader. In that the Internet provides the end-to-end network without regulating the content, it facilitates both the transmission of ideas and their subsequent mutations—maybe, when taken on a cultural scale, this has greater longevity and impact than a stone tablet.
Like you said, just because information is equally accessible, it is not necessarily equal. We will naturally spread a lot of bad ideas (maybe mostly bad ideas), but democratization of information also means that an individual with the mind to do so can seek out self-regulating communities that propagate good ideas. Democratization also offers freedom from the editorial bias of publishers.
In Borges’ labyrinth, the odds of finding an index are infinitely small. With digital words, we already use powerful index systems. Granted they inadequate and subject to the pretenses of their creators, but I think we can expect them to improve as the volume of information increases.
The seemingly and actually pointless information that makes up most of the web may yet be found to have extreme, real value when taken in aggregate. The meta-information produced by say, a few hundred million narcissistic Twitter users over time will far outstrip the combined value of all the digital words they self-published.
As always, very impressed by the high quality of both your writing and ideas, and jealous of the apparent ease with which you explain yourself so clearly. Would absolutely love to see you review this book on your blog: http://www.amazon.com/Uncreative-Writing-Managing-Language-Digital/dp/0231149913
As usual, I appreciate the challenging and generative nature of your insights. An early draft of this posting actually included a small section on the library at Alexandria. I removed it because it seemed to be taking on a life of its own – a life that is worth exploration but that would have guided this particular piece off course.
On the surface, I am inclined to agree with you – the library at Alexandria and the Internet both seem to work toward a similar end: the centralization of information. However, I struggle to take the comparison much further because of the differences in the ways this centralized information was actually used.
The library of Alexandria is, in many ways, the manifestation of a paradigm shift in the Greek understanding of knowledge (a paradigm shift that I would argue was only possible because of the written word and the spread of literacy). The Socratic approach to understanding was a deeply personal method of oral interaction – Socrates believed that dialogues would push discussion towards a greater understanding of truth. Dialogues like the Gorgias show that Socrates believed this view to be distinct from the mindset of the Sophists who were less concerned with truth than with using rhetorical strategies to win arguments. Though Plato shared some similarities with his teacher, the Platonic approach to knowledge systematized the Socratic view of philosophy into the curriculum for a formal academy. At the time, this meant Plato’s Academy and the Sophist schools were in competition with one another – a tension that ended up producing a third option: Aristotle’s Lyceum. Rather than succeeding Plato as the head of the Academy, Aristotle formed his own school that decidedly embraced the written form. Rather than entering into the fray between Plato’s students and the Sophists, Aristotle’s method of philosophy was one of synthesis: he aimed to analyze the doctrines of the different positions in order to unravel their apparent contradictions. This is a “writing-based” method of philosophy: Socrates’s speech thrived on one-sided positions; Plato’s arguments seemed to revolve indefinitely around the same questions; but Aristotle’s written method allowed for an inclusive and ecumenical approach to philosophical debate.
In many ways, the library of Alexandria is a macroscopic version of Aristotle’s work – which makes sense since Alexandria is the direct result of the Hellenistic tradition brought about by Aristotle’s student, Alexander the Great. On the shelves of any library, we find the juxtaposition of works that disagree with one another, and yet, this juxtaposition creates an environment in which someone might open them up side by side and confront their latent disparities. It is important to note that this was the primary usage that emerged from the Alexandrian library: while the Ptolemies went through great lengths to secure any and all available scrolls to be stored in the library, it was not the centralization itself that was important, it was how the centralized information encouraged the collation, translation, and synthesis of texts. While other scholars at Pergamum used their resources to interpret the possible allegorical meanings within Homer’s work, the Alexandrians used their resources of scrolls to collate an accurate rendering of The Iliad that got every sentence and word right – a process that involved comparing multiple manuscripts to one another. Likewise, it was in the library of Alexandria that the first Greek translations of Roman law, Egyptian history, Babylonian astronomy, and the Hebrew Scriptures emerged. And many of the famous academic works of that era – Euclid’s Elements, for example – also were created as a direct result of the library; however, these were not so much original works as they were the synthesis of many other works that had been collected within the library.
I think this is a big difference between the library of Alexandria and the Internet. The former’s value was found not in its accumulation of information, but in the environment that it created for propagative work to be done with that information. Scholars travelled from all over to visit the vast archives, to study the works that were stored there, to compare them with one another. The vastness of the Internet precludes it from creating anything that resembles this same environment of scholarship. From a standpoint of functionality, online databases may serve in a way that is similar to how the Greeks used the library, but this sort of usage represents a very small portion of how the average consumer interacts with the information that Internet makes available.
Your point about the longevity of the digital word is an interesting one. My father owns a photography store, and one of the relatively new phenomena that he has noticed emerging with digital imaging is that people who previously backed up their photos on floppy disks or CDs are now finding that years of photographs have been lost due to file corruption or rapid changes in hardware. On the flip side, photographs that are now stored on cloud-based servers are safe from some of the dangers that hard copy photographs used to suffer from – fading, tearing, heat damage, etc. It seems like both methods immortalize – perhaps just in different ways and with different limitations. The appeal of the democratized medium is, as you said, that it can subvert the traditional power structure that governs what images people see and what texts people read. The downside of this is that without some level of discernment, information can become ubiquitous and, in time, meaningless. This is where I see the content of this particular article overlapping with the field of education. In a changing media environment, it becomes necessary to teach students how to negotiate these changes, how to cultivate discernment. Unfortunately, most literacy instruction doesn’t involve this sort of discussion.
As for Borges’s library and the power of search algorithms for indexing the digital word, I’m not sure that a search engine can really solve the problem of language becoming meaningless in an oversaturated information environment. If all of Borges’s library was digitized and searchable, this would make it easy to find whatever book that you are looking for; however, it would also make it easy to find all of the books that contradict that book, that undermine the authority of that book, that say almost the same thing but with slight variations. The fact that there could be hundreds of thousands of contradictory books for every book that you find, and the fact that you could find them all instantly might make the process more efficient, but I’m not sure it would actually make the inhabitants of the library any more knowledgeable or any less despondent. If anything, I could see it being more depressing: at least with books the inhabitants could hold out hope for discovering truth; but with a digital library of Babel, you realize instantly that you have no epistemic heuristic for discovering what is and isn’t true and you are doomed to go through the rest of your life with that knowledge.