Remember

In his 2009 book What is an Apparatus? Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterized his titular inquiry as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” (1) He goes on to explain that beyond institutions (such as schools, factories and prisons), apparatuses can also include, “the pen, writing, literature, philosophy…computers, cellular telephones, and…language itself.” (2) In this symbiotic realm of object and subject, Agamben implies a fundamental, if enigmatic relationship between people and the materials that shape us, as we shape them. Author Vik- tor Mayer-Schoenberger mines the mnemonic niches of this provocative notion further, tracing a history through what he calls “external memories” crucial to the development of human knowledge, and how humans know. From prehistoric cave paintings and ancient scrolls, all the way to the diary of his stepfather, Mayer-Schoenberger finds a thread less in specific content, and more in how “[my relative] externalized what was important to him, so he would have the cues he needed to remember something later.” (3)

In 1945, in search of the next evolutionary stage of memory, American engineer Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) imagined a mechanical library (called the “memex”) that would revolutionize acts of remembering by quickly and efficiently storing information without pen or paper. Seeking to better the subject by making it one with the object, he touted, “[The memex] is an enlarged intimate supplement to [man’s] memory.” (4) From prosthetic to co-presence, American psychologist J.J. Gibson (1904-1979) theorized this acceleration of the apparatus to a place where an object or environment – according to its inherent properties – dictates how it can be used. (5) When applying this model to paper (as authors Abigail J. Sellen and Richard Harper do in their 2001 book The Myth of the Paperless Office), Gibson’s theory of “affordances” describes a thin, light, opaque and flexible material affording tactile, quintessentially human actions of grasping, carrying, folding, recording and writing. Xu Bing’s essay in this catalog traces a piece of the long, interwoven history of man and paper that followed, where the material created to record memory implicitly embodies its place, maker, and the maker of all things. In a recent feature in The New York Times, contemporary paper maker Timothy Barrett recalls the anthropomorphic connection of finding an imprint of a person’s thumb in a renaissance-era tome, adding, “The fingerprint marked the sheet with the humanity of the person who made it. I could feel his presence.” (6)

Yet as the interface between mankind and the book continues to move through time, the centuries-old relationship between man, material and memory is redrawn in, and by the digital era. At this intersection of text and technology, David L. Small surveys a wave of mutations (in his doctoral thesis Rethinking the Book) as the exponential growth of electronic information spawns a hybrid apparatus in Agamben’s catalog. (7) This essay will consider the reciprocal affect of paper’s evolution upon its maker, tracing the trajectories of book, page and print as a reflection of man’s ambivalent relationship with the media of memory. In a time where the conjoined life of paper and person faces a sublime frontier in the digital unknown, famously iconoclastic artist and author Doug Coupland locates an unsettling, but ultimately necessary paradigm shift at the precipice of human fate. Issuing an ultimatum with apocalyptic flair, he declares “Books are central to the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. At least for now… One way or another, books will cease to exist. They’ll either be supplanted or humanity will become extinct.” (8)

To this point in the evolutionary trek of mankind across the millennia, the aforementioned Timothy Barrett heralds paper “as the elemental stuff of civilization.” (9) His epic claim is reinforced by Dr. Dorothea Eimert, who earnestly asks – in the foreword to Therese Weber’s 2007 book The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years – “Could our civilization and the science of today exist without paper?” (10) Yet in the past two decades, paper’s lengthy reign as the repository (some may say architect) of cultural memory is being usurped by swift technological change and the worldwide growth of smart devices. (11) And while many may view this challenge to paper’s empire as a more recent phenomenon, such an overthrow has arguably been in the works since the 1800s. During this time, a seemingly endless number of starry-eyed inventors and enterprising companies have introduced new technologies to replace, “the old, paper-based ways of doing things.” (12) From phonographs, telephones and radio to television, email and texting, paper – as the default avatar of old-fashioned practices and technology – has become a dead man walking; something to be bettered, improved, and surpassed as the word “paperless” has become synonymous with progress.

Yet while we think of “new media” as “mass media,” and the book as a stalwart of indi- vidual experience (isolating and affirming the Western notion of self), Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) reminds us that said book was the first vessel of mass communication. (13) He dedicated much of his life to mapping the evolving social dynamics between media, message and memory, highlighting – as a case study – the way the printing press changed not only the quantity of pages, but the character and relationship between author and authored. Before that, before the epoch-setting invention of Johannes Gutenberg, paper was the technological bellwether of its time – relegating more “primitive” writing surfaces (such as stone, wood blocks, clay tablets and sheets of laminated bark) to antiquity. The lessons that previous generations had learned solely by listening, watching and doing were subsequently squeezed into words and documents, materializing memory while narrowing the heterogeneity of oral traditions. (14) Far from universal embrace, there was corresponding lament and anxiety in some corners – with 19th century British conservatives going so far as to denounce “mass” reading the way contemporary pundits condemn television and the Internet. Speaking to the colonial nature of media (in words eerily apropos to paper’s current status vis-a?-vis digital technology), McLuhan argued, “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.” (15) In this light, paper’s role as a refugee of the information age may contain emancipatory potential. Rather than fighting against obsolescence, irreverent German theorist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that being irrelevant (or “untimely”) was in fact, the most contemporary state – in that it allowed one a greater perspective of time and context. (16) Inside its outsider role, the book can thus be an oracle as the page becomes a portal; their “auras” (with credit to Walter Benjamin) regressing from democratic dissemination to revered reliquaries.

As the norm now goes, the more ubiquitous objects (such as books, records, photo albums and cash) are replaced by digital/virtual “upgrades,” the more their original forms become the stuff of fetish. Just as the dematerialization of the art object (popularized by Marcel Duchamp and “named” by Lucy Lippard) led to a gradual resurgence in the art / act of making, the popularity of e-readers has produced a counter-fascination with the collection, display, and “object-ness” of books. (17) From embellishing coffee tables to being lit aflame by political opponents, Harvard English professor Leah Price gives voice to a swirling vein of ontological (arguably Greenbergian) formalism when stating, “I’m interested not just in words – the verbal structure of a book – but also in the material object.” (18) Shifting the focus from what they say (informational utility) to what they are (physical utility), Price has lived the paradigm shift between the historical “vulgarity” of treating a book as a bare object, to a place where, in her words, “It is legitimate to use a book as a paperweight, [or] to use an encyclopedia as a doorstop.” (19) In the hands of modern-day designers and decorators, this materialist re-purposing takes on new flair as the architectonic properties of books turn them into plinths, pillars and risers for antique furniture, while their symbolic capital (as signifiers of knowledge and sophistication) turn them into status-driven ornaments. Like messiahs for the pariah, a recent New York Times report credited French “New Designer” Philippe Starck as one of a growing number of said innovators to “give books a stay of execution” by using them as decor. (20) In a similar gesture of paradoxical salvation, some publishers are keeping print alive to fend off the economic losses of e-book file sharing – containing the flow of information in a vessel once used to spread the word. (21) Prognosticating on the fate of an object thus being pushed outside its function, Bob Stein – the Founder of “The Institute for the Future of the Book” – envisions his ward becoming a rarified luxury item for those that prefer deluxe packaging. In this uncanny context, as content slips into a state of being inconsequential, one must wonder what, and how the page will speak?

Beyond a heightened value as object, paper has now become an instrument for bestowing value upon that which it carries – like prime real estate for the life of words. In so doing, a hierarchy of information is instituted akin to that McLuhan observed in 1960: where books embodied the highest echelons of knowledge, and tele-media were incidental aids. Decades later, in response to Coupland’s previously cited ultimatum (and the perceived glut of raw information on the Net), blogger Scott Anderson gives credence to a growing print/digital class system when stating, “As much as I love the feel of paper, the vast majority of information transmitted from the printed page doesn’t need to come from a printed page.” Whereas a digital text can live forever in accuracy and integrity – endlessly reproducible and beyond the grasp of analog vulnerabilities (i.e. age, light) – its sheer ubiquity infuses this information with the air of disposability. In his 2011 book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the aforementioned Mayer-Schonberger demonstrates how such data can be simultaneously infinite and inferior: arguing that – in contrast to earlier eras where it was more prudent to shed space-hungry files – it is that much easier “to keep everything” when the files are immaterial. Eschewing editors, selection and Darwinism in the process, this derogation of the digital obscures the fact that – according to researchers Ronald E. Rice and Sara Schneider – most paper documents are misfiled, lost, or obsolete before they could even be considered valuable. (22) Yet the very fact that such information is considered “important” enough to be printed on paper speaks to a romantic resurrection of the values with which we once processed such information. From sustained attention and linear thinking to an admirably non-instrumental approach to words in print, the implicit content of these pages are the ideals that, ac- cording to Professor Price, we want to believe we have.

Elaborating on this crucial point, Price emphasizes, “In thinking about new media, we measure what we do now against a nostalgic baseline. We compare the way we really do use digital media to the way we imagine we once used printed media.” (23) Taking this one step further, it can be argued that by systematically printing emails and photos, building files until they bulge, and littering our desks with sheets of all sorts, it’s as much about what we want to remember, as how we want to remember remembering. Like a pseudo-mnemonic device of apperception and sublimation, this printing of digitized information tries to reunite the page with the ways we hope we once processed their con- tents. Renowned techno-sociologist author Steven A. Johnson injects a particularly revealing foil into this conversation when speaking about the inability to skim an e-book as easily (or as satisfyingly) as a paper book. Challenging our supposedly dedicated path through the tomes of old, he explains, “The digital age is supposed to be all about attention deficit disorder and hypertextual distractions, but e-books lock you into reading them in a linear fashion more than print books do.” (24) In this more objective mirror, in the stark, unforgiving stare of perfect digital memory, the mythology of our relationship to paper can be seen leading us to mis-remember; to hallucinate halcyon days of pure thought that – depending on your perspective – push us to demand more from digital sources, or chase a Lacanian ideal that never was.

And yet there is something so very tangible, so gratifying, of feeling the physical weight of one’s progress through information move from the right to the left hand. (25) From hallowed scrolls to softcover paperbacks, the motor memory of collecting one’s cognitive conquests is as intoxicating as it can be obfuscating. How much do we truly recall, and how much of that is actual content, versus the process of attaining that content?

In a recent study of knowledge worker practices across a spectrum of esteemed fields (law, finance, advertising, design), Alison Kidd found that paper documents were rarely filed or referenced after being generated. Instead, in a manner reinforcing Mayer-Schonberger’s aforementioned thesis of external memories, it was the process of taking these notes that helped said workers to construct and organize their thoughts. (26) Sellen and Harper had similar findings in their study of Information Technology workers, highlighting their printing of emails “to read [the information] and make sense of it,” and reminder memos that – according to their perceived importance – were reiterated into smaller pieces of paper then posted on a bulletin board or computer monitor. (27) In both studies, digitally generated information was manifested (and arranged) in the offices of these workers as temporary, but tangible constellations of documents meant to stoke, maintain and organize memory. Reading the ensuing desk piles as cartographies of a desired relationship between information and cognition, Kidd adds, “This [ostensible] clutter provides important clues to remind [these workers] of where they were in their space of ideas.” (28) Sellen and Harper are even more direct in their assessment, stating, “Without these bits of paper ready at hand, it is as if the writing, and more especially the thinking, could not take place in earnest.” (29)

In an even more formative intersection between material and memory, similar aspirations in, and of paper characterize the relationship between college students and textbooks. A recent survey by the Book Industry Study Group found that nearly 75% of U.S. college students preferred physical texts over their digital equivalent. The University of Toronto Bookstore sees much the same attitude amongst their constituency, with Director of IT Services Peter Clinton observing that said students, “despite having grown up in the Internet era, still largely prefer to read from the printed page.” (30) And while Clinton emphasizes that “we’re at a tipping point” when it comes to full-scale conversion from paper to digital publishing, a long-heralded parallel shift in the business world has failed to fully materialize. Sellen and Harper confirm that while “The future of the electronic office seemed assured, [and] the hegemony of paper doomed,” that in actuality, “the promised ‘paperless office’ is as much a mythical ideal today as it was thirty years ago.” (31) Their research goes on to reveal that the World Wide Web has increased the amount of printing done at both home and office, the same way “the use of email in an organization causes an average of 40% increase in paper consumption.” (32) Across Europe, North America and other parts of the world, paper consumption is thus climbing as office workers continue to choose it as their preferred medium for reading, reviewing, delivery, planning, and organizing files. In so doing, paper’s Platonic properties (i.e. thoughtful processing and seeding memory) are just as present here as they were in previous examples, with an added dimension of social currency. That is to say, many of these workers allocated special importance to the hand delivery of these documents to “humanize and personalize these processes.” (33) Reflecting the people in/of paper’s surrogate status within a dauntingly “paperless” world, Sellen and Harper echo Coupland’s forecast when adding, “[the material’s] physical presence on someone’s desk drew attention to itself and served as a continual reminder to the recipient that action needed to be taken.” (34)

As paper lingers precariously on our collective, cultural desk – moving in and out of time as digital information colonizes almost every facet of being – just what action will take place remains to be seen. In Mike Huster’s 2011 story for MPS Insights, “Paper is dead or long live paper?” he coolly reports, “Eventually, as has been declared, print as we know it, is dead” (my italics). (35) In so doing, he reiterates a widespread belief shared by many around the world, while also opening the provocative notion of metamorphosis. Behind all the anxiety, elegies and hand-wringing, the key point in this increasingly deafening dirge is that while the material (body) – print as we know it – may wither and perish, the praxis (spirit) can transmute itself, its surrounding media, and the people employing this evolving apparatus. The sentimental nostalgia that paper afforded, allowing us to romanticize the way we were (and fear the way we could be), is giving way to precise data streams that demand address, and a more realistic rear view mirror. And yet, at the same time, the ethos of paper is softening the exacting stare of technology’s infallible memory – burnishing the edges and blurring the recall to create a more conducive, human space for us to “progress.” (36)

The enduring presence of paper “artifacts” upon office desks and college bookshelves speaks as much to wistfulness and habit, as it does to the anxiety that technology brings in a mechanized world. In a 1995 study of the social (“shadow”) costs brought about by the advent of e-systems, author and researcher Carole Groleau found that after computerization, many office workers continued to use paper files that the new systems were supposed to replace. (37) Rice & Schneider reinforce this finding in their research, recog- nizing the umbilical nature of paper within the digital frontier when observing, “The old forms were desktop artifacts serving as symbolic interfaces for the individual between two system regimes, providing a sense of continuity and security during a time of uncertainty.” (38) McLuhan reminds us that similar unrest was felt when books unseated oral instruction’s perch atop the information pyramid, and that such upheaval is as much predicament as opportunity. Foreseeing the unsettling, but necessary winds of change that technology would bring to the world of print, he wrote, “This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we’re confused, baffled.” (39) Cracks consequently fractured the imprint (implicit and explicit) of the page upon us, its population, propelling people to migrate with the spirit, if not the substance of paper. Decades later, awash in the waves of digital revolution and paper boats of ersatz intellectualism, Price echoes McLuhan’s charge when urging us to not “make the history of the book a stick with which to beat digital media.” (40)

Akin to tea leaves in occult divination, it’s helpful to look once again at the typical office desk for direction in the dialectical trek towards synthesis. With the desktop computer as the nucleus of today‘s work station, Rice & Schneider note how the importance of sur- rounding paper artifacts are often “ranked” by their user (sometimes subconsciously), according to their proximity to the central beacon. In turn, core operating systems of the computing industry (Windows, Mac OS) have greased the wheels of desired communion by allowing users to organize data into paper-familiar devices such as files, folders and recycling bins. To continue to ease hesitant minds and facilitate more widespread digital migration, Sellen & Harper underline how new technologies are being developed “to look and feel more paperlike.” (41) From Kindles to Kobos, e-books are trying diligently to emulate the affordances of books and pages (including opaque screens, portability, margins, annotation features and patina) – prompting the aforementioned Bob Stein to proclaim in the era of e-reading, “We’re in 1464 – the infancy of Gutenberg’s press – and everything is poised to change.” (42) Making things new by making them more the same, such concessions to the legacy of paper allow us to dig niches in the heart of the machine, and maintain the necessary delusions to get beyond our fears. As a foil to the “humanizing” of digital memory he believes crucial, Mayer-Schonberger warns that, “Too perfect a re-call, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past behind.” (43)

Instead – in the same way that the author reflects his/her apparatus – the equivocality, vulnerability and contingency of paper is a more accurate mirror of the human mind in its very inaccuracy. To better reflect the slippage, sfumato, and subjectivity of human memory, Johnson believes that digital texts will evolve the way of Wikipedia, “where the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox.” (44) Rather than finish and authority, the digital “page” could be a palimpsest of gathering, gesture and – ultimately – a renewal of man’s earliest ways of knowing himself and the world. The always prescient McLuhan believed as much, highlighting the ways mass media (radio, TV, film) pushed the written word “back” to its origins; towards spontaneous shifts and a freedom of the spoken idiom. In his words, “[New media] aided us in the recovery of an intense awareness of facial language and body gesture.” (45) Thus emphasizing man’s fundamental role in the life of information, he goes on to add that, “If these ‘mass media’ should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won’t be because there’s anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we’ve failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage.” (46)

In this light, if the birth of paper once narrowed the recollection of human vernacular, its life has allowed us to record great things, and romanticize them into even greater things. If the passing of paper obscures such memories – both real and imagined – its resurrection into an omnipresent, immaterial digital state affords new space for us, for the children of this apparatus, to collectively become the next page.

– Steven Matijcio 2012

About the author.

Steven Matijcio is the present curator at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and a former curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York and has held positions in a number of galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. Matijcio is a lecturer and published writer, and in 2011 was a curator in residence in Gwangju, South Korea and Berlin, Germany. He won a 2010 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for the project “paperless” and in 2012 he was the curator of the fourth Narracje Festival in Gdansk, Poland. Matijcio was also commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 2003 to curate one of their first online exhibitions.

Matijcio is responsible for the Inside Out: Artists in the Communities II project that took place at SECCA in 2010. Inside Out II was a varied event aimed at mixing up different organizations and communities, and included walks, temporary sculpture and street art. At its root, it was meant to, in his own words, turn “the familiar into the unfamiliar”.

Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.

 

2 Ibid.

 

3 Viktor Mayer-Scho?nberger quoted in Stuart Jeffries, “Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age,” The Guardian, 30 June 2011. Mayer-Scho?nberger’s stepfather’s diary included such quotid- ian notations as the daily temperature, and the quality of butter he had eaten that day. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age>

 

4 Vannevar Bush quoted in Abigail J. Sellen & Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), 4.

 

5 James Jerome Gibson cited in Sellen & Harper, 17. The theory of “affordances” is elaborated in American psychologist J.J. Gibson‘s seminal 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

 

6 Timothy Barrett quoted in Mark Levine, “Can a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization?” The New York Times, 17 February 2012. In Alexandra Perloff-Giles’ 2011 Harvard Gazette article “What books mean as objects,” Harvard English professor Leah Price fondly reflects upon years spent in libraries looking for the physical presence/evidence of human use – savoring the discovery of “which pages have been cut, or which pages have been worn down by the mark of successive thumbs… coffee spills or wax stains from reading by candlelight.” <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/timothy-barrett-papermaker.html?pagewanted=all>

 

7 David L. Small, Rethinking the Book (Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT, 1999). A Thesis submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the re- quirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. <http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/thesis/DSThesis.pdf>

 

8 Douglas Coupland, “Insects” in the Time Capsules series. The New York Times: The Opinion Pages, 31 August 2006.

 

<http://coupland.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/insects/>

 

9 Barrett quoted in Levine.

 

10 Dr. Dorothea Eimert quoted in Therese Weber, The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years (Bang- kok, Thailand: The Orchid Press, 2007), xiv.

 

11 Paper is being abandoned as an archival material, despite Edward Tenner’s claim that, in a side-by-side historical comparison, acid-free paper actually lasts longer than today’s computer memory and media stor- age. Some business offices are taking note of this situation, implementing policies where paper back-ups are now required for digital records.

 

Please see Edward Tenner, “The Paradoxical Proliferation of Paper,” Reprinted with permission from Har- vard Magazine, March-April 1988, p. 23-26 <http://cool.conservation-us.org/byorg/abbey/ap/ap02/ap02-3/ap02-309.html>

 

12 Sellen & Harper, 2.

 

13 Marshall McLuhan, Excerpt from “Classroom without Walls,” Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). <http://faculty.uml.edu/sgallagher/marshall_mcluhan.htm>

 

14 Artist Natasha Bowdoin happily references the “time of the bards” in her work, where one would “carry” stories as intangible oral histories, changing and adapting their constitution with every new context.

 

15 McLuhan quoted in Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone, editors, Essential McLuhan, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 278.

 

16 Friedrich Nietzsche cited in Agamben, 40-41.

 

17 “Manufacture” Media Release, E-Flux, 5 February 2012 <http://www.eflux.com/announcements/manu- facture/> & Betty Ann Jordan, “Beyond the Coffee Table,” Fashion Magazine, Summer 2011, page 150-156.

 

18 Leah Price quoted in Alexandra Perloff-Giles, “What books mean as objects,” Harvard Gazette 10 May 2011. <http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/05/what-books-mean-as-objects/>

 

19 Ibid.

 

20 Jordan, “Beyond the Coffee Table.”

 

21 Sellen & Harper, 10 & Scott Anderson, “The Mobile Revolution,” University of Toronto Magazine, Autumn 2010. In another paradox of the “paperless era,” It must also be noted that while the value of paper compa- nies falls in the stock market, the actual production of paper continues to reach historical highs. <http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/life-on-campus/university-of-toronto-ipads-in-library-system/>

 

22 Ronald E. Rice & Sara Schneider, “Information Technology: Analyzing Paper and Electronic Desktop Arti- facts,” in Carolyn A. Lin & David J. Atkin, editors, Communication Technology and Social Change: Theory and Implications (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2007), 102. From years of research into the filing procedures of business offices, Rice & Schneider found that almost 3% of all paper documents are misfiled, 8% are eventually lost, and almost a full third are obsolete before they are used.

 

23 Price, “What books mean as objects.”

 

24 Steven A. Johnson quoted in “How We Will Read: an interview with @stevenbjohnson from the @findings blog,” findings, 15 February 2012 <http://blog.findings.com/post/17661615384/how-we-will-read-an-interview-with-stevenbjohnson>

 

25 In Rethinking the Book, David L. Small reiterates that if you read books with both hands, the left hand holds what has been read, while the right hand holds information yet to be gleaned. “By weight and feel you know where you are, even if it never percolates to the conscious level.” The dogears, bookmarks, margin notes and annotations that accumulate along the way add to this tangible process, in a way that window-like screen of monitors and e-books are not yet able.

 

26 Alison Kidd’s 1994 study “The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker” as cited in Sellen & Harper, 63-64. To view Kidd’s full article, please visit:

 

<http://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni- siegen.de/home/VolkmarPipek/PUBLIC/workgroup/Papers/Kidd1994_KnowledgeWorker.pdf>

 

27 Sellen & Harper, 13, 111.

 

28 Kidd quoted in Sellen & Harper, 63. 29 Sellen & Harper, 1.

 

30 Mike Huster, “Paper is dead or long live paper?” MPS Insights, 11 February 2011 & Peter Clinton quoted in Anderson, “The Mobile Revolution.” Clinton goes on to report that 90% of their survey respondents stated that if they purchased an e-textbook, they would want the option to print at least a portion of it. Respondents to the Book Industry Study Group survey stated they liked the “look & feel” of books, as well as their “per- manence and ability to be resold.” Huster article: <http://www.mpsinsights.com/insights-blogs/paper-is-dead-or-long-live-paper/> 31 Sellen & Harper, 5, 2.

 

32 Ibid., 1, 7.

 

33 Ibid., 68.

 

34 Ibid.

 

35 Huster, “Paper is dead or long live paper?”

 

36 Mayer-Scho?nberger warns that society’s capacity to forget could be suspended by perfect digital memory, creating an ominous realm of self-censorship, and a shroud upon the creativity that can come out of cyclical mistakes and misinterpretation.

 

37 Carole Groleau cited in Rice & Schneider, 112. The full title of Groleau’s 1995 unpublished doctoral dis- sertation is “An examination of the computerized information flow contributing to the mobility of tasks in three newly computerized firms.”

 

38 Rice & Schneider, 115.

 

39 McLuhan, “Classroom without Walls.”

 

40 Price, “What books mean as objects.”

 

41 Sellen & Haper, 7.

 

42 Bob Stein quoted in Levine, “Can a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization?”

 

43 Mayer-Scho?nberger quoted in Jeffries, “Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age.” 44 Johnson quoted in “How We Will Read.”

 

45 McLuhan, “Classroom without Walls.”

 

46 Ibid.