My eye was drawn this week to a masterful essay, in the nature of a letter to the editor, by Mathew Battles, a rare books librarian at Harvard responding to the attack of Sven Birkerts on e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.  As Battle writes in his prelude:  “... Sven Birkerts, in an article on TheAtlantic.com, suggests that [the Kindle] augurs the end of the culture of letters.”

In response, Battles writes persuasively that:

Yet the culture of letters has always been subject to disruption and transformation. Indeed, since the advent of print, technologies of the book have changed dramatically, and with them the book’s place in society. The world of letters not only transcends these technological changes—it thrives because of them. Were that not the case, the cultural continuity that Birkerts holds so dear would have been lost long ago.

After documenting the precious rarity of books in the Medieval Ages, hand-crafted gems more scarce than courtiers or cardinals, Battles discusses the impact of the Gutenberg era:

Then, as movable type began to take hold in the age of Copernicus, Erasmus, and Luther, some worried that the printing press would devalue the book. But in fact, it represented a disruption only to the channels of authority that had hitherto controlled the creation and distribution of word and image. Likewise today, the Kindle and other information technologies are less likely to destroy the authority of books than to disrupt the authority of those who control the place of books in our society.

Battles notes that Birkerts uses the experience of the poet Wallace Stevens as an exemplar of holiness of letters, but in contrast to Bikerts, Battles notes the wealth of context around Steven’s poetry and life that the internet has made emergent.  Birkerts cites Bartlett’s quotations, but Battles begs to differ:

Contrast its thin fare with YouTube, where you can listen to the poet himself read "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"—where you'll also find an animated photograph of Stevens performing "No Ideas But In Things" in the poet's own voice; John Ashbery discussing Stevens' impact on his work; or any number of unknown readers reciting Stevens' works in front of their computers. Wikipedia, meanwhile, tells me that a portrait of Stevens' wife Elsie served as the basis of the profile of Mercury's head on the Liberty dime. I can view Stevens' house on Wikipedia, and follow links from his entry there to information about the lives and works of his contemporaries, critics, and poetic legatees. There is a context here far richer than anything the glue-and-boards Bartlett's can offer. But here's the rub: we have to make sense of this cornucopia of information ourselves. Wikipedia is not a one-stop shopping source for tidbits of misinformation; it is a living discourse, inviting dialogue and participation.

It is this prong: dialogue and participation, or as I might wish to suggest, engagement and participation, that is the catalyst for our newest age of letters, our best transformation of the means of communication we have yet sundered from the poverty of our long efforts to better ourselves.

Last week, I had the fortune of attending a Hewlett Foundation meeting on Open Educational Resources (OER); amongst the grantees, there were a wealth of other foundations represented: Wikimedia, Soros, Gates, Lumina, and Moore circulating amongst us.  We had fascinating and compelling conversations; on every turn a new initiative.  I was enthused by the passionate discussions that pulsed around me, and motivated by the unseen fruit that might be borne from the introductions that I and others will make with those not in attendance, conceived in the hope of exposing riches to a greater public, via previously unimagined fulcrums.   On my part, the thrill of introducing Wikimedia Foundation to the Smithsonian Institution: priceless.  Go, for God’s Sakes, Leap at chance!

Yet there was a disquiet in the hallways.  A sense of a slow, growing staleness among the projects.  Those who had attended for two or three years running noted the continuing centrality of the availability of "content" in the roundtable discussions: how do we make more of it available to a larger number?  How shall we describe it?  What content might best be chosen?  These seem vital, and such questions are, but there was a growing sense that it was not all of what makes our futures worthwhile.

It is as Battles noted: engagement and participation, and these were missing from our dancing.  There was a single session (led by Phoenix Wang) on gaming, mobile, and alternative paths through the navigation of knowledge: it was an outlier.  Road Trip Nation was inspiring, and there were a few others as well.  But few ...  few.

It is as if the effort to assist education through the production of OER content has been waylaid by too steadfast an effort.  It is in the context of the culture which the net provides that we craft new advantage in our attempts to re-understand and re-write the world: not merely finding information, but finding the context of it, and working with it.  It is hearing Stevens recite the poetry, or listening to someone discuss the poet’s place in American thought: that is the engagement.  And the participation is working with the poetry, applying it to make something new, either creative, or a new interpretation in our understanding of history, or the struggles of the people that the poetry represents.  That is the participation.

Thoreau wrote in Walden,

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.   It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.  I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.  It is true I fear that others may have fallen into it and so helped to keep it open.  The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

So our own organizations and initiatives.   We should be riding a different road now: certainly as our mission, more content to assist in curricula is a fine thing, let us not wait to get more of it exposed.  But the wealth of our society lies in working with it, and we must press ourselves to construct new tools that facilitate that.

The new presses of the next age; the new libraries and the new museums; they are not measured solely by their resources but by their understanding of the worth of engagement and participation, and their ability to weave their content, as the Guardian so lovingly put in, “into the fabric of the web.”