Chris McCandless
Heir to a lie
Not a doctor or lawyer, not a hippie or punk
Diminished expectations
Generation X

Alexander Supertramp
Lost son of fortune
Vagabond and philanthropist, itinerant and mystic
Destination Alaska
Climactic battle to kill the false being within

Educated reader
London, Thoreau, Tolstoy
Sold paperbacks on the slabs
Packed more books than food
Happiness only real when shared

What would you say
If you met Alexander Supertramp on the road
Go find that girl and work for Wayne
Go home and love your folks
Write your book

If you meet the mystic on the road
You know what to do

“Blog” is a funny term but the format always made perfect sense to me. People have been blogging since the web was invented. It wasn’t called blogging then but it was a web log, a web page with a list of dated entries. You had to have a little technical skill to create and maintain the page. Web 2.0 made it easier for everyone. Blogging was different than writing in print only because you could be published instantly. Blogging was still like writing in print because it allowed for long-form writing. You could write a snippet and you could also write an essay or a short story. People read them. It was literary if you wanted it to be. Keeping up with the explosion of reading material could be a challenge, but this slow reader was happy.

Twitter was a different animal. It was just a status bar, a single text box, 140 characters, nothing more. I tried it for awhile just to see what everyone was going on about. Line after line of snippets, often declaring nothing more than “Lunch!” or a link. I was supposed to watch this? Yuck. I deleted my account, publicly predicted its demise on the trash-heap of Web 2.0, and carried on blogging as before.

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. It rapidly gained popularity and currently has 140 million active user worldwide. I noticed the blogosphere change in 2007. Blog posts became less frequent. Fewer blogs were being created. The blogosphere was draining away to Twitter, or so it seemed. I was disappointed initially to see this trend, but it had a curious upside. Those who continued to write blogs were the ones who enjoyed long-form reading and writing. The blogosphere became more literary. Still, blog visits were dropping and comments scarcer. The online community was moving to Twitter.

If I was going to be a player I had to learn Twitter. I already knew the simple use of Twitter, but I needed to make better use of visualization technologies like TweetDeck and filters like hashtags. I did see that Twitter offered a very different view on the world, highly localized. Conferences can be boring if you just sit and listen to a speaker. The same event can be stimulating if you are interacting with its audience members thought by thought. Twitter provides a view we did not have before. I grokked it.

The shape of knowledge is changing, and we are changing with it. Twitter is one associated technology. Mobile is another. I held fast to long-form writing because I was certain that length was required for complex thought. I am not so certain anymore. Today I find myself more involved in my many communities because I have granular digital knowledge of what’s going on. I have to yet to see a displacement of core mental processing, but if I can call upon all the details I need, then configure and re-configure them on demand, then I have a new ability for complex thought, and it does not depend on complex planning or long-form reading. I am still considering the implications of that conclusion.

The coming of the prophet had been foretold for millenia. She was only a girl when her parents brought her to the temple for the first time. It was a place of quiet reflection and books, and it was not the church. As she grew, the prophet and her companions often went to the temple. It was a common place for people to meet, and it was not the mall.  The time came when the prophet came into her power. She went to the temple and beheld how it had changed. Silence was no longer enforced. The wooden horses of access had been sent to pasture. Shelves of books had been pushed back to make way for the plastic boxes of data. Digits were the new currency in a marketplace of information transactions. Order had given way to complexity. The priests of knowledge had become the servants of the knowledge seekers. Should she take up a whip and drive them out? Oh no. She was in the library, and she deemed it very good.

I have had a long and satisfying relationship with libraries. It did not end with the usual trips to the public library as a child. I joined the library club in high school (what a nerd). After high school, I participated in a Canadian youth program called Katimavik in which I volunteered in libraries, teaching computers to the Inuit and preparing instructional materials for high school teachers in Saskatchewan. I was an undergrad in the late eighties. In first year I learned to use the library’s print indexes. The next year the library acquired its first digital indexes, CD-ROMs checked out from the front desk and viewed on one of four computer terminals. It was such an improvement, it was god’s gift to students. After my undergrad I thought about going to library school, but decided the information technology field had a better future.

Fifteen years later, libraries were thriving. I decided to go to library school after all. A graduate program demands papers, so I was back in the library. The CD-ROMs were gone. Its new core was an information commons with rows of computer terminals, also accessible online. Even in the days of the CD-ROMs the photocopiers were the workhorses of research, now a few remaining units gathered dust. The experience provided a clear comparison of the old and the new. Unquestionably, research was a much easier job. If I imagined that library school was a shelter for my old bookish ways I was wrong. Something changed in the nineties. Frustrated by the slowness and costs of techies doing their computer work for them, librarians became techies. They built their own systems and claimed their space online. Stifled by classrooms, I found the best part of my library education online, in the library blogs, where a generous community of librarians and information professionals eagerly engaged learners.

You may think I am too zealous about libraries. I will not disagree and my zeal is not quite finished.  In this chapter I hailed “Generation Codex” the last generation of a 2000 year equation between print and knowledge. That period coincides with the rise of Christianity and is attributed to it. The early Christians favoured the codex because it was easy to carry and conceal. Arguably, Christianity and the codex are also falling together. This chapter captured insights from the last generation of print. I could not help but slip into a first person perspective. I told a story of the Dutch immigrants, a people of the book, the Bible. No longer a believer, my soul is imprinted with the need for deep reading and metaphysical questioning. As church attendance declines, where does one go for refined insight and knowledge? Online, yes, it is a good place to start. Deep seeking also needs a shelter, a sanctuary, a place for its community to gather. The mall? No. Libraries, of course. Libraries are the new temples.

Image 1: Library of Parliament, Canada. Source.

Image 2: Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Source.

I don’t know what inspired my five-year-old self to stick his tongue on an electrical outlet. Got quite a zap but I survived, not necessarily wiser. In grade eight science class we learned the basic electrical circuit. The ends of two wires are affixed to the positive and negative nodes of the battery, and the other ends to a lamp, making a circuit. The circuit is interrupted by a switch that when flipped lights the lamp. Hey, a little voice in my head said, electrical outlets have two slots for the two prongs of a plug. Could I light the lamp by inserting the two wires into an electrical outlet? Yes I could, and it blew up in a flash too. Knowing my history, I have no idea why my sister asked me to attempt to fix her broken vacuum cleaner. The electrical cord had been cut. Hmm. Two wires on one end, two wires on the other. A bit of wire twisting and electrical tape later, I hesitantly plugged the thing into an outlet. My life as a hacker roared to a start.

Hacker. It is a term often wrongly associated with cyber-crime. In Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham¹ describes hackers as those hands-on programmers who need to bend, break or invent patterns. This I, Reader series is about the connections between books and technology.  When it comes to books, hacking seems to be the order of the day. The emerging story is that in the days of print, the development of knowledge was an orderly process of research, writing, and publishing. With the advent of the web, the story continues, all that is getting turned on its head. People from all corners can research any amount of information and publish direct to the web. The fixed container of the book is being cracked open, transformed into e-books, applications, and networks. There is some truth in this story, however the subtext is that openness, hacking and innovation are values that emerge from digital technology. My experience tells me different.

I fancy myself a hacker, yet I am not naturally disposed to mathematics or technology. I have always had a preference for letters over numbers. Put me in an English class, reading Shakespeare or Steinbeck, my brain was on fire. In math class, three steps into a proof, my brain seized. Called upon to write my homework on the chalkboard I borrowed the solution of my smart math friend, Rob. It backfired when the teacher was impressed with my (his) brilliant solution and asked me to explain it. Zap. I preferred letters, Rob numbers, but we got along very well, playing Donkey Kong on his Intellivision, dreaming up programs for his Commodore 64. Somehow, I ended up working in the computer industry while Rob is a farmer. (He outsmarted me again.)

After completing a psychology degree I worked in health research for a couple of years. Quickly fed up with manually crunching numbers, I learned how to program Microsoft Excel. A course later, I passed Microsoft certifications in VB6 and found my way into a programmer’s job at an IT consulting company called LGS, just acquired by IBM. Though I nearly died in panic on my first assignment, I have since designed and built dozens of software systems for corporate clients, and patented a search technology. It seems I have an aptitude for technology after all.

People go into information technology for different reasons. I was drawn to the subgroup of programmers who in another economy might have been writers. These were the people who learned programming as teens to build text adventure games. These games allow a writer to create an entire world. It is irresistible to hackers who like to remake and improve the world. There is a core connection between coding and writing. No where is it clearer than in programming that technology is made out of text. Lines of code are written according to a syntax. Well-written code is beautiful, a statement that other programmers will read and admire. “Code is poetry,” say the makers of WordPress. As Graham says, hackers are motivated by a similar impulse as people drawn to writing, painting, and other arts.

In The Pattern on the Stone W. Daniel Hillis² describes the basic ideas that make computers work. He uses tic-tac-toe to introduce the idea of a universal computer. Inspired by him, I built a tic-tac-toe computer out of the same circuitry materials I used as a kid: a battery, wires, bulbs and switches. Seeing the thing work, a light bulb went on in my head. Computing is more basic than digital technology. The drive to openness, hacking and innovation is more basic than digital technology. Of course it is. Digital technology began as a hack. If books are being reinvented today, it is not because digital technology has permitted their liberation from print. No, quite the opposite, digital technology is built on text. As always in the human story, imagination and writing are the instruments of creation.

Gaming predates digital technology, of course. My father played Yahtzee with anyone who was willing. Yahtzee is a game of dice, the aim to score the most points by rolling dice in poker combinations. Roll all five dice with the same number and you cry out “Yahtzee”, earning fifty points. We recorded the score of every game over the years. One day I decided to sum all the scores. I was stunned. Every player had the same score, averaging about 320 points per game. Of course they did, it was a game of dice, of chance. As long as players knew how to play the game, in the end the average outcome could be predicted statistically.

I stopped playing video games when I was fifteen. I remember the day, back in 1981. I had a part-time job sweeping floors at the local Chevy car dealership so I could afford to throw away a few quarters, but they always seemed spent too early. One day I decided to take a whole roll of quarters to the arcade. A roll is ten dollars, fourty quarters, fourty games. I wanted to get to the end of a SuperCobra, in which a helicopter flies across a terrain, armed with a gun and bombs. The copter has a dwindling fuel supply but you can increase it by blowing up fuel tanks. There is an end to the game, a finale after the first ten sections. I didn’t reach it. Twenty quarters into the game, I had come further than ever, but frankly I was bored. Nothing really new ever happened, just variations on a theme. The outcome was essentially predetermined. I stopped playing video games.

As a GenX, my teen years were a strange mix of books and technology. We read the classics in English. We read genre fantasy books and played Dungeons and Dragons. The game involves rolling multi-sided dice to resolve probabilities and the consultation of statistical tables. Personal computers were just emerging, and it was not long till we realized the potential of programming to facilitate the games. We programmed more. We gamed more. The more involved we became, the more books we read too. Writing programs encouraged some of us to try our hand at writing stories. It was a wild and wonderful mix of digital and print technologies.

Is the book evolving into a video game? The very point of e-books is to take advantage of digital technology. The ability to search is a no-brainer. The same should be true for annotation but this risks opening the text in a way that might let people steal the profit from publishers. What about books as entertainment? What does a book become when a publisher adds digital technology to a book to make it more fun? What technology will be added — audio, video, games? Perhaps the reader can choose options for the characters: male or female, young or older. Is this object still a book, or is it a movie, or a video game?

It is too easy to malign this development of books, and their apparent trajectory toward applications and video games. I am not convinced that we should be closed to their literary potential. Dr. Sara M. Grimes is an Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature and New Media at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. She tells of her experience growing up, playing the video game, Final Fantasy 7:

But at a certain stage one of the protagonists, Eris, is suddenly murdered by the bad guy. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. And I tried, replaying the level several times to see if I could save her if I did things differently. I’d spent hours with this character, watching her fall in love, building up her abilities, marveling as she evolved from a simple healer into a powerful magician. And I played the game even after Eris died but never really got over it. And later I discovered that millions of people all around the world had had that same deeply emotional reaction as I did to Eris’ death. It’s inspired songs, tributes and artwork.¹

Books have long been esteemed as the vessels of culture and quality. There are plenty of lousy books, of course, the ones heavily typed into genres, produced for those who will pay money to get more of the same. Genre is contrasted with literature. It is literature that has earned books their respected position. Just say the word, literature, and everyone knows you are talking quality. What does it mean to be literary? Not all genre is bad. Good writers know how to use the predictability of their genre in novel ways to surprise and delight readers. New genres are being created all the time; the forerunners deserve particular respect. To be literary is to be unpredictable, to break rules, to challenge the reader. In doing so, the work is generative, inspiring others to create new works. I see those qualities in Grimes’ video game. Print does not own literariness.

Generation Codex is the crossover generation, the last generation of the print world, and the first of the new digital world. At its core is the group called Generation X, those born in the sixties and seventies, old enough to remember an exclusively print world, young enough to learn computers in skills. Of course, generational analyses are limited. Many people older than GenX were early adopters of computers. Many people younger than GenX genuinely understand print. Generation Codex includes them all. It is a loose grouping of people who grok both print and digital technologies.

There will come a time when the way of print may be forgotten. It is worthwhile to pause and consider the experience of people growing up in the world of print. Literacy is the focus. Consider writing. The art of penmanship was taught in schools. It was a measure of achievement to be allowed to use a pen instead of a pencil when one’s handwriting was good enough. My children did not learn penmanship in school. Why bother? They will be using a laptop in their studies and jobs.

I learned to type on a manual Underwood in my father’s printing shop. I took a typing course in high school. I learned touch typing. Eight fingers on the middle row, the home row, and my fingers learned to find their keys without looking. I did not bother taking the “advanced” keyboarding class. It was a new class, introduced soon after the arrival of computers in the school. By that time, I was already using a keyboard daily, in the computer class, on my new personal computer. There was no such thing as typing or keyboarding class when my kids went to school. They spend hours a day on keyboards of all kinds, adept even using their “hunt and peck” method of typing. There was a time when it was distinctive to list WordPerfect on one’s resume. Today if you don’t know Word and half a dozen other programs you might be out of a job.

Do not mistake these reflections for nostalgia. There are only so many things a curriculum can contain. Add something, take something away. There are new competencies to be mastered. Just spend a moment considering if anything of value should not be lost. With each passing year I do more digitally: calendars, lists, editing. I still take my fastest and most complex notes by hand. Is it a skill yet to be mastered by Generation Codex, or is there a connection between print and complex thought not yet afforded by digital technology?

What did GenX read and how did we read it? The reading lives of any people are varied, of course, but there are important patterns. We read the fantasy and science fiction of luminaries not yet fully appreciated. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was not a blockbuster movie. The television series, Star Trek, had been cancelled for lack of interest, only revived later by the letter writing campaigns of the next generation.  Something was afoot. Science fiction boomed in the twentieth century as science and technology entered our daily lives. One day we were watching beeping and flashing computers on television. The next week personal computers were being wheeled into our schools. Science fiction mattered. It was as if the books were inventing the technology, literary determinism.

Space travel was an important theme, of course. Arguably, it was the computers that mattered more. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took us to the edge of the solar system, but the artificial intelligence, HAL, spooked and intrigued us most. In Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer, Deep Thought, gave us the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.¹ Asimov’s I, Robot series and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep puzzled out the ethics around machine life.

A wooly minded fascination with technology may lead to technological utopianism, but science fiction is a sandbox for asking difficult social questions, a tool for critical thinking. The citizens in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness were neither male or female, an exploration of life without duality. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land introduced the term, “grok”, and invented the waterbed. It challenged traditional religion and social mores around love. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World cautioned how technology can be used to control people. Vigorous reading of science fiction shapes minds that are post-modern and critical.

Authority was being questioned and the censorship backlash predictable. Orwell’s 1984 had sex! Huxley’s Brave New World was banned for its supposed endorsement of free love, drugs, atheism and the rejection of the nuclear family; never mind that the book was a criticism of its fictional utopia. Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, of all books, still gets banned for offensive language. The internet is no guarantee of freedom from censorship. Think of Canada’s Bill C30, allowing the government to monitor what people are reading. It is astonishing to watch Canadians mobilize against bills like this. Bill C11 was about copyright; a generation ago no one cared about copyright legislation. Technologically savvy readers know where these bills are going, and freedom to read is their prime directive.

Digital technology led to cheap publishing and the internet. Suddenly books were everywhere and going digital. For a time it seemed as if information overload was a greater threat to censorship, eclipsing the time we used to spend reading books. Bit by bit, the filters got better, reducing the noise of the internet. More than that, readers have learned to accept that they cannot know a thing in its entirety. Knowledge has changed that way. Truth is more momentary and situational. We still read. Our brains have been reprogrammed to some extent, better able to scan volumes of information. Better too at picking out the good stuff, digits be damned, the good books that will claim some hours.

The 1980s was the rise of the personal computer. It was also the coming of age of Generation X, the generation born after the baby boom ended. Analyses of identity by generation can overreach and should be interpreted carefully, but something clearly unique happened to GenX. They were born into a world in which print was still the single currency of thought. Paperwork was still typed on paper, banking happened inside banks in front of tellers or on cheques, and reading implied a print book. In public consciousness, computers were machines in military labs, the stuff of science fiction. The boomers were also born into this world but it was GenX that was reading the science fiction, the works of Asimov and Clarke and LeGuin. GenX was old enough to be conscious and competent in the ways of print culture, while young enough to be educated in personal computing and be the first masters of its skills.

The terms, “digital native” and “digital immigrant” were coined by Mark Prensky¹. A digital native is a person born after the introduction of personal computer, and digital immigrant is one who is born before that time. Boomers and GenX are digital immigrants. Prensky observed the generational conflict between older teachers and supervisors using older methods of instruction with younger digital natives already living and breathing the new technologies. The terms enjoyed popular adoption but others have responded with critical research. Zur and Zur found that digital immigrants who are early adopters of technology are similar in ability to digital natives.² This finding does not negate the generational analysis by Prensky; it refines and clarifies components of it.

The notion of a digital immigrant has more intricacies. First generation digital natives are being raised by digital immigrants. The child born today inherits a world fashioned by elders who thought in books. The internet as we know it is one of the great feats of literacy, a vehicle of language, built on text-based programming languages. Digital immigrants and digital natives, we are all a people of the book.

The concept of a digital immigrant is still a useful one. Things are changing. Digital technology lends itself to more loosely organized thought, shifting clusters of meaning, and small stories; away from highly structured thought, epic narratives, and encyclopaedic knowledge. The internet of tomorrow may be a very different thing. GenX was the last generation of children to crossover from a world that was completely analogue in its technology to a new world dominated by digital technology. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, calls it a two-act play, an analogue youth and a digital adulthood.³ We need to write down and analyze the living memories of GenX and their immigration from the analogue to the digital world. Is there anything in that lifeworld that should not be lost? How did it fashion thought and identity? What has changed?

One does not hear many stories of the Dutch immigrants to North America, or find many memoirs expressing the complexities of their experience. My own parents came to Canada after World War II, their families seeking economic opportunity. As is so often true, the reality was harsher than the dreams. A hardy folk, they struggled like the first pioneers, scraping out their daily meals working long hours on land that did not belong to them. Pragmatic lot that they are, they assimilated quickly and there has not been a strong tradition of telling their stories.

The Dutch immigrant communities were close knit. Their religious and cultural centre was the Christian Reformed Church, a protestant denomination, evangelical and Calvinist, emphasizing careful reading of the Bible. No child of Dutch immigrants was unfamiliar with the Bible. Three meals a day ended with a reading of scripture. My father cycled us though the entire book a few times. Visiting a Dutch classmate on a Saturday the lunchtime routine was the same, prayers and Bible reading. At the Christian school (the Dutch school some called it, with all those blonde heads) the curriculum was consistent with the theology. My grade eight science class was a pilot test for a Christian science text, Look to the Ants. Add to these readings two sermons on Sundays plus weekly meetings, clubs, and catechism classes. Reading with this intensity affects how you think and who you are. It shapes your identity and your community. We were a people of the book.

Young people became part of the adult community with a profession of faith ritual before the church. We prepared for this event by attending classes at the Minister’s house after church on Sundays. It was a pleasant affair, with coffee and cake, and light discussion of the Nicene Creed. After the second last class, I dropped out. I could not say why at the time. A few years later I would explain it as discomfort at the totality of the belief system, the unwillingness to admit that the whole Christian story might be wrong. The clergy paid lip service to doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Rejection of the faith was not an option. The unwillingness to admit uncertainty made all the adults in my life liars. It was not for me.

I fancied myself free of the influence of the church but I was wrong. For us television was evil but book reading was fine. I escaped into forbidden reading, Lord of the Rings and Catcher in the Rye. Was I so different from the first Christians preferred the print codex over the scroll because it was easier to hide from the authorities? In English classes at the public high school, I was the one who caught the Eden symbolism of the two rivers in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. In university I was drawn to the long essay courses in psychology and philosophy. In graduate school, I wrote a book, Slow Reading, about the benefits of reflective reading. I have long since settled my differences with the church. It is easy for a youth to cry hypocrisy but most of adults I knew were good people, better than their theology.  I am not a believer but I maintain a respect for religion as mythology in the sacred sense, scaffolds for engaging the unknown. My soul is imprinted with a weakness for deep reading and metaphysical questioning. I am a person of the book.