It seems to me that Roger Chartier does not reach back far enough in his search for the precursors and constituents of the online age. In many ways, it is restoring the mode and even the tempo of the interaction of human minds to those of the oral tradition. Oral/aural interactions occur at around the speed of thought, to which the brain is optimally adapted [1], at least in its real-time, online functions. Reading, and especially writing, were always solo, off-line functions, in the Codex as well as the Gutenberg age. The speed of interaction was reduced orders of magnitude by the sluggish turnaround time of handwriting and even print, although their scale and scope, and of course their all-important permanency and accuracy, were incomparably enhanced by the new scripted tradition.

But now, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy of online skywriting/reading, the dialogic cycles of interaction among human minds have at last been returned to something much closer to the speed of thought, yet retaining and even hyperextending the power and advantages of the lapidary medium (verba volunt, scripta manent). [2,3]

Chartier writes:

> the 'book' [can be contrasted with] the free and spontaneous electronic > communication which allows everyone to circulate their thoughts and > works on the Web. This division... could help [explain] the major > differences between, on the one hand, spontaneous texts released onto > the web, and on the other, vetted, edited writings.

That dynamic communication (but not its global scale) is a throwback to the oral tradition. The static digital book, whether on-paper or on-line, drastically constrained the freedom and spontaneity. But the possibility of skyreading -- appending graffiti to everything that appears in the digital skies -- can breathe interactive life into the dead pages of books, opening on-line dialogues with the written word even after the author is deceased. [4,5]

None of this has anything to do with the orthogonal dimensions of published/unpublished or vetted/unvetted, which are, and always have been, merely quality-control tags sign-posting the corpus, whether on-paper or on-line. [6]

> Another element [that] could... turn the world of digital > technology on its head [is] the possibility of detaching > the transmission of electronic text from the computer... > through the creation of electronic ink and 'paper'.

"Virtual books" -- digital peripherals that simulate as much as we want to retain of the look and feel of books -- are not advances but throw-backs. It is not at all clear how many of those familiar features of books are really optimal and how many are merely habitual. But there is no doubt that what is really revolutionary about e-texts is their navigability [7] and interactivity [4,5] and not their papyromimetic capacity.

> Electronic texts could thus be emancipated from the constraints > inherent to the screens we are familiar with. This would break the bond > (a source of profit for some) between the trade of electronic machines > and on-line publishing.

Until and unless book authors elect to give away their texts [8] as the authors or refereed research do [9] (and I doubt they ever will: why should they?), the similarities between on-paper and on-line books will far out-weigh their differences (insofar as trade matters are concerned).

> the electronic revolution, which at first seems universal, > can also deepen, rather than reduce inequalities. A new 'illiteracy' > could emerge, no longer defined by the inability to read and write, but > by the impossibility of gaining access to the new forms of transmission > of writing -- which, to say the least, do not come free.

I think this often repeated worry is too pessimistic. The main use of online networks by the public will be for advertising and sales. That guarantees that every effort will be made to maximize access for all. The give-away literature will simply be the flea that rides for free on this vast commercial dog.

> An electronic correspondence between authors and readers - now transformed > into co-authors of a book kept open through their comments and > interventions - allows for an author-reader relationship, close in kind > to that to which some ancient authors aspired but hard to achieve with > the printed book. A more immediate, more dialogic relationship between > the work and the reading of the work...

True -- except that most of what self-appointed commentators have to say will hardly be worth hearing, any more than it was in the oral medium. Quality-control sign-posting (by qualified experts, where necessary) will continue to be our guide, as it was in the Gutenberg age. [6] Most of the virtual chatosphere will be a global graffiti board for trivial pursuit, the Gaussian distribution of human verbiage being what it is.

> when reading on screen, the contemporary reader returns somewhat to the > posture of the reader of Antiquity. The difference is that he reads a > scroll which generally runs vertically and which is endowed with the > characteristics inherent to the form of the book since the first > centuries of the Christian era: pagination, index, tables, etc. The > combination of these two systems which governed previous writing media > (the volumen, then the codex) results in an entirely original relation > to texts.

I cannot follow any of this. The modern cybernaut surfs the web much the way he surfs the TV (and the two will no doubt converge). This in turn approximates how he navigates the real sensorimotor world. But for those interested in the scholarly/scientific flea, the classical indices of quality (qualified expert judgment) will still be the filter and guide.

> The electronic conversion of all texts whose existence does not > originate with computers must in no way entail the downgrading, > neglect, or, worse, destruction of the manuscripts or printed matter > which bore them in the first place.... If the works that they have > transmitted cease to be communicated, or even preserved in anything > other than electronic form, the risk is great that the past's textual > cultures, embodied as they are within the objects - the books - which > have transmitted them, will no longer be intelligible to us.

I could not follow this either. It sounds like a version of the frequently voiced (but groundless) worry that the digital texts may become unreadable some day. The simple answer is that it depends on our commitment to preserving them -- exactly as it does with the "analog" texts (which are likewise digital, by the way, but in a dedicated peripheral device: print-on-paper). 100% certainty of survival is not possible in any medium, but we can certainly match the probability of print-on-paper, or surpass it, if we wish.

> the reader-navigator of digital technology is at a high risk of getting > lost in textual archipelagos without beacon or harbor. The library can > be both of these.

The library is not the beacon, the quality-tagging is, as it always was. [6]

> Another role for the libraries of tomorrow could be that of > reconstituting the sociability around the book, which has been lost. > The long history of reading teaches us that, over the centuries, > reading became a silent and solitary practice, and broke itself further > and further away from the shared conviviality of writing which once > helped unite families, friendships, scholarly societies or militant > groups.

The conviviality that skyreading/writing will restore is not merely the sluggish, formal, off-line one of letter-writing, but the on-line one of near-real-time oral interaction. [3]

> In the United States, the essential factor [in the "reading crisis"] is > the drastic reduction in the acquisition of monographs by university > libraries whose budgets are eaten up by subscriptions to periodicals... > Hence the [reluctance] of university publishers to publish works that > are considered too specialised: doctoral theses, monographic studies, > scholarly works, and so on.

Now here there is room for something further revolution -- but only for the scholarly/scientific flea. [9,10] Stay tuned. [11]

[1] Harnad, S., Steklis, H. D. & Lancaster, J. B. (eds.) (1976) Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280. http://www.nyas.org/

[2] Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html

[3] Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A. Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994; and in Japanese in Research and Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems 1994-1995. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html

[4] Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.interactive.cognition.html

[5] Light, P., Light, V., Nesbitt, E. & Harnad, S. (2000) Up for Debate: CMC as a support for course related discussion in a campus university setting. In R. Joiner (Ed) Rethinking Collaborative Learning. London: Routledge (in press). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.skyteaching.html

[6] Harnad, S. (1998/2000) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

[7] Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5): 629-638. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.html

[8] Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Varian/new1.htm

[9] Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm

[10] Harnad, S. (1995) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

It seems to me that Roger Chartier does not reach back far enough in his search for the precursors and constituents of the online age. In many ways, it is restoring the mode and even the tempo of the interaction of human minds to those of the oral tradition. Oral/aural interactions occur at around the speed of thought, to which the brain is optimally adapted [1], at least in its real-time, online functions. Reading, and especially writing, were always solo, off-line functions, in the Codex as well as the Gutenberg age. The speed of interaction was reduced orders of magnitude by the sluggish turnaround time of handwriting and even print, although their scale and scope, and of course their all-important permanency and accuracy, were incomparably enhanced by the new scripted tradition.

But now, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy of online skywriting/reading, the dialogic cycles of interaction among human minds have at last been returned to something much closer to the speed of thought, yet retaining and even hyperextending the power and advantages of the lapidary medium (verba volunt, scripta manent). [2,3]

Chartier writes:

> the 'book' [can be contrasted with] the free and spontaneous electronic > communication which allows everyone to circulate their thoughts and > works on the Web. This division... could help [explain] the major > differences between, on the one hand, spontaneous texts released onto > the web, and on the other, vetted, edited writings.

That dynamic communication (but not its global scale) is a throwback to the oral tradition. The static digital book, whether on-paper or on-line, drastically constrained the freedom and spontaneity. But the possibility of skyreading -- appending graffiti to everything that appears in the digital skies -- can breathe interactive life into the dead pages of books, opening on-line dialogues with the written word even after the author is deceased. [4,5]

None of this has anything to do with the orthogonal dimensions of published/unpublished or vetted/unvetted, which are, and always have been, merely quality-control tags sign-posting the corpus, whether on-paper or on-line. [6]

> Another element [that] could... turn the world of digital > technology on its head [is] the possibility of detaching > the transmission of electronic text from the computer... > through the creation of electronic ink and 'paper'.

"Virtual books" -- digital peripherals that simulate as much as we want to retain of the look and feel of books -- are not advances but throw-backs. It is not at all clear how many of those familiar features of books are really optimal and how many are merely habitual. But there is no doubt that what is really revolutionary about e-texts is their navigability [7] and interactivity [4,5] and not their papyromimetic capacity.

> Electronic texts could thus be emancipated from the constraints > inherent to the screens we are familiar with. This would break the bond > (a source of profit for some) between the trade of electronic machines > and on-line publishing.

Until and unless book authors elect to give away their texts [8] as the authors or refereed research do [9] (and I doubt they ever will: why should they?), the similarities between on-paper and on-line books will far out-weigh their differences (insofar as trade matters are concerned).

> the electronic revolution, which at first seems universal, > can also deepen, rather than reduce inequalities. A new 'illiteracy' > could emerge, no longer defined by the inability to read and write, but > by the impossibility of gaining access to the new forms of transmission > of writing -- which, to say the least, do not come free.

I think this often repeated worry is too pessimistic. The main use of online networks by the public will be for advertising and sales. That guarantees that every effort will be made to maximize access for all. The give-away literature will simply be the flea that rides for free on this vast commercial dog.

> An electronic correspondence between authors and readers - now transformed > into co-authors of a book kept open through their comments and > interventions - allows for an author-reader relationship, close in kind > to that to which some ancient authors aspired but hard to achieve with > the printed book. A more immediate, more dialogic relationship between > the work and the reading of the work...

True -- except that most of what self-appointed commentators have to say will hardly be worth hearing, any more than it was in the oral medium. Quality-control sign-posting (by qualified experts, where necessary) will continue to be our guide, as it was in the Gutenberg age. [6] Most of the virtual chatosphere will be a global graffiti board for trivial pursuit, the Gaussian distribution of human verbiage being what it is.

> when reading on screen, the contemporary reader returns somewhat to the > posture of the reader of Antiquity. The difference is that he reads a > scroll which generally runs vertically and which is endowed with the > characteristics inherent to the form of the book since the first > centuries of the Christian era: pagination, index, tables, etc. The > combination of these two systems which governed previous writing media > (the volumen, then the codex) results in an entirely original relation > to texts.

I cannot follow any of this. The modern cybernaut surfs the web much the way he surfs the TV (and the two will no doubt converge). This in turn approximates how he navigates the real sensorimotor world. But for those interested in the scholarly/scientific flea, the classical indices of quality (qualified expert judgment) will still be the filter and guide.

> The electronic conversion of all texts whose existence does not > originate with computers must in no way entail the downgrading, > neglect, or, worse, destruction of the manuscripts or printed matter > which bore them in the first place.... If the works that they have > transmitted cease to be communicated, or even preserved in anything > other than electronic form, the risk is great that the past's textual > cultures, embodied as they are within the objects - the books - which > have transmitted them, will no longer be intelligible to us.

I could not follow this either. It sounds like a version of the frequently voiced (but groundless) worry that the digital texts may become unreadable some day. The simple answer is that it depends on our commitment to preserving them -- exactly as it does with the "analog" texts (which are likewise digital, by the way, but in a dedicated peripheral device: print-on-paper). 100% certainty of survival is not possible in any medium, but we can certainly match the probability of print-on-paper, or surpass it, if we wish.

> the reader-navigator of digital technology is at a high risk of getting > lost in textual archipelagos without beacon or harbor. The library can > be both of these.

The library is not the beacon, the quality-tagging is, as it always was. [6]

> Another role for the libraries of tomorrow could be that of > reconstituting the sociability around the book, which has been lost. > The long history of reading teaches us that, over the centuries, > reading became a silent and solitary practice, and broke itself further > and further away from the shared conviviality of writing which once > helped unite families, friendships, scholarly societies or militant > groups.

The conviviality that skyreading/writing will restore is not merely the sluggish, formal, off-line one of letter-writing, but the on-line one of near-real-time oral interaction. [3]

> In the United States, the essential factor [in the "reading crisis"] is > the drastic reduction in the acquisition of monographs by university > libraries whose budgets are eaten up by subscriptions to periodicals... > Hence the [reluctance] of university publishers to publish works that > are considered too specialised: doctoral theses, monographic studies, > scholarly works, and so on.

Now here there is room for something further revolution -- but only for the scholarly/scientific flea. [9,10] Stay tuned. [11]

[1] Harnad, S., Steklis, H. D. & Lancaster, J. B. (eds.) (1976) Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280. http://www.nyas.org/

[2] Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html

[3] Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A. Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994; and in Japanese in Research and Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems 1994-1995. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html

[4] Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.interactive.cognition.html

[5] Light, P., Light, V., Nesbitt, E. & Harnad, S. (2000) Up for Debate: CMC as a support for course related discussion in a campus university setting. In R. Joiner (Ed) Rethinking Collaborative Learning. London: Routledge (in press). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.skyteaching.html

[6] Harnad, S. (1998/2000) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

[7] Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5): 629-638. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.html

[8] Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Varian/new1.htm

[9] Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm

[10] Harnad, S. (1995) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

[11] Harnad, S. (2002) Skyreading and Skywriting for Researchers: A PostGutenberg Anomaly and How to Resolve it. Virtual Symposium. November 14-30 2001. "Screens and Networks: Towards a Relationship With the Written Word?" Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou. 2001 - March 2002. http://www.text-e.org/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/pompidou.htm

Stevan écrit: "But now, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy of online skywriting/reading, the dialogic cycles of interaction among human minds have at last been returned to something much closer to the speed of thought, yet retaining and even hyperextending the power and advantages of the lapidary medium". Un medium très peu lapidaire, en réalité. La possibilité de réecriture du texte, la difficulté de distinguer entre différentes 'éditions', entre un texte original et des versions posterieures, le besoin de garantir un travail d'édition (cf. à ce propos l'intervention de Cory McCloud: "The Immaterial Book" dans le débat: "Material Culture and the Electronic Book") sont des problèmes nouveaux liés à la volatilité du texte électronique. Un enregistrement vidéo d'un entretien oral devient désormais un medium plus 'lapidaire' que sa transcription dans le medium éphémère de l'écriture digitale.

On the fully tractable problem of preservation and version tagging, please see:

Day, Michael (2001) E-Print Services and Long-Term Access to the Record of Scholarly and Scientific Research. Ariadne 28. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/metadata

Roger Chartier propose un paradoxe qui a une portée importante pour les discussions futures : L'omniprésence de l'écriture accompagne la disparition du livre et du lecteur. Une façon de résoudre de la paradoxe est de soutenir la co-existence entre une pluralité des supports et des façons de lire. Concernant le livre électronique, la co-existence semble en effet définir bien l'état présent où les très faibles qualités fonctionnelles du livre électronique (faible interactivité, mauvaise qualité de l'écran) rendre durable une co-existence avec une prédominance du livre imprimé tant que le e-book sera l'alternative unique au livre. La disparition du livre et son remplacement par le texte électronique suppose de détacher la notion de livre et de lecteur de l'écriture et des opérations graphiques. Ce que Goody et Olson avaient deja noté à propos des écritures non alphabétiques comme des proto-écritures. Dans ce cas il faut relativiser la notion de livre et de lecteur. Deux arguments plaident dans ce sens. Un argument historique : Non seulement la pluralité historique des formes de lecture qui ont co-existé avec la forme livre mais l'existence d'écriture avec des interprétations des signes graphiques qui sont très éloignées de ce qu'on appelle lecture. Un argument anthropologique : la notion de livre et de lecteur ne semblent être d'abord des catégories culturelles (ou tout au moins relationnelles) qui permettent de rassembler dans un même ensemble des artefacts et des opérations mentales et physiques associées à ces artefacts qui sont disparates. En un mot, il est possible que le livre disparaisse mais il est aussi possible que les catégories de livre et de lecteur ne permettent pas de comprendre les opérations graphiques qui sont réalisées sur des écrans. De la même façon, les propriétés interactives et dynamiques auxquelles fait allusion Steve Harnard ne sont pas facilement inscriptibles dans un dispositif livre/auteur/lecteur. Que ce dispositif soit notre mode principal de compréhension des signes graphiques dans nos cultures relativise son application à des technologies cognitives nouvelles.