Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.9.11 | We like to think interactive media is a product of our contemporary digital age. But readers, for one, have been interacting with written texts since, well, the advent of written texts. 

It’s called marginalia—personalized notes and comments on a text, often scribbled in the margins of a book. Much as social media has allowed for a cultural back channel—a conversation alongside or behind the scenes of the events of the day—marginalia also has acted as a parallel conversation on a text. And as we begin to ponder the future of books, cultural critics are simultaneously anxious and hopeful about the future of marginalia.

The headline of Dirk Johnson’s recent New York Times article—“Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins”—implies that marginalia might not survive the e-reader revolution. Some of the academics and curators Johnson interviews, however, are more neutral:

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

The article (or maybe just the headline, in some cases) sparked many varied reactions. Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher at O’Reilly Media who maintains a book publishing blog, believes marginalia will flourish with e-readers—especially as the note-taking and note-sharing capabilities improve.

Like Wikert, Sam Anderson, writing in The New York Times Magazine, envisions a future where you can call up not only your friends’ marginalia but the notes of famous readers of the text throughout history. This is part of Anderson’s “grand vision of the future of social reading.”

Anderson, who describes marking up books as both addictive and useful, is still a bit ambivalent, however, about the ability of the e-book to provide the same meta-experience:

The digital book — scentless, pulp-free, antiseptic — seems like a poor home for the humid lushness of old-fashioned marginalia. You can’t even write by hand in an e-book — at least not comfortably, not yet. As John Dickerson recently put it on Slate, describing his attempt to annotate books on an iPad: “It’s like eating candy through a wrapper.”

Although I’ve played with Kindles and iPads and Nooks, and I like them all in theory, I haven’t been able to commit to any of them. As readers, they disable the thing that, to me, defines reading itself. And yet I’ve continued to hope that, in some not-too-distant future, e-reading will learn to take marginalia seriously.

Anderson ultimately believes that the interactivity of marginalia is fully compatible with, even a predecessor to, social media. And this bodes well for its place in the digital reading future:

Marginalia — with its social thrill of shared immersion — is what the culture is moving toward, not away from. We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions. The best parallel in critical writing might be online episode recaps of TV shows: a viewer rolling around in a work of art, noticing it deeply, not just (as critics too often do) resorting to distant acts of intellection. Marginalia is literature’s TV recap, although even more satisfying: real-time commentary happening in the core of the thing being commented upon.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is trying to make the future happen today. Its CommentPress open-source plug-in for Wordpress blogs, which we previously wrote about at length, can “turn a document into a conversation” by allowing comments, paragraph by paragraph, in an online text. (We hear Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute, is at work on an even more flexible tool for writing in the margins and making books and reading a more social experience. Stay tuned.)

As school librarians are discovering more ways to get e-readers into students’ hands and states such as Iowa are adopting statewide ebook programs, the need for easy annotating tools is increasing.

And as the very nature of books and reading is in flux, retaining the indisputably beneficial aspects of a physical book can make for a better transition for everyone. According to Sam Anderson, James Bridle, proprietor of a blog called Book Two, has done the best thinking on the subject:

Bridle argues that in a world in which we’ll no longer own books as discrete physical objects, the only really meaningful thing we’ll own will be the reading experience itself. Our current e-books, he writes, are fine at the basic function of letting us read a text. They’re very bad, however, at something that physical books are good at: gathering “metadata” about our reading — broken spines, dog-eared chapters, marginalia. This metadata is crucial. It is, as Bridle puts it, “where our experience of the book lives.”

If you’re interested in taking part in this debate, visit Bridle’s site, Open Bookmarks—which has shifted its purpose slightly to create a manifesto for social reading. The text is just the beginning.