I know that I am going to be spiraling off Andrew Piper again today, but I don’t care because I love his book and just want to write about him all the time. Piper’s second chapter of Book Was There is all about the effect that the object has on our faces. This reminded me of an art project that occurred a few years back, so I immediately went to my favorite online literacy tool, Google’s search engine. Now, I couldn’t find the article that discussed this project, and I also couldn’t remember the name of the artist, and it was possibly the first time I ever felt disoriented using Google. This disorientation, though, occurs often and is perhaps the main difference I’ve noticed between the materiality of the book and the virtuality of texts online, which was compounded by the fact that the page I was looking for WAS NOT THERE.
I must admit that I am getting more comfortable with writing on this blog, since I’ve started to consider this simply a form of being social otherwise. The reason I say this is that I managed to find out the name of the artist by asking my facebook friends in a status about the origins of this artist, and whether or not I had gone insane by not being able to use Google effectively. My friend, who will remain nameless (though you could just look at my profile on facebook to see who it is), sent me a link which answered my question. The page had been effectively taken down due to the intervention of the secret service in conjunction with a cease and desist from apple! Another article details the artist’s–Kyle McDonald–experience and the rationale behind the whole ordeal.
So I decided to upload two different pictures, one of me reading the Huffington Post this morning, and the other of me reading Piper’s Book Was There. Even these two pictures detail the real difference between turning away and looking on that Piper emphasizes in his second chapter. The other difference, which remains shocking to me, is that I could not find anything else besides a couple articles afterwards that discuss McDonald’s work, while what I really wanted to see were the photographs of customers at a New York Apple store staring blankly–usually–into the screen. Perhaps my friend is right that the main reason this work was taken down was that the “Panopticon doesn’t like it when we turn our gaze on it.” All of this is to say that I see Piper’s even-handed argument about the benefits and disadvantages of reading online or digitally in this experience. On the other hand, after seeing the article on Wired, I realized that I had already read this at one point, and somehow forgot about it. Once again, and I realize that I am mythologizing the book again, I definitely feel like the articles I read online disappear from my memory much more quickly than anything I’ve ever read in a book. This subjective argument, though, should be the topic of my next post with, hopefully, some research to back it up.
Anthologize this . . . 