[Six Degrees by Laurens van Lieshout under GNU Free Documentation License]

Humans love connections. It’s what we are.

We’re good at spotting them, obsessed with making them. In the industrial nations – or whatever parlance we’re using these days to mean ‘the bits of the world which are richer than the other bits and have broadband and clean water; which have at some time invaded much of the rest of the world; and which are in consequence on the top of the pile by most concrete measures’ – we’ve managed to create ourselves a society where we’re disconnected from one another, and we hate it.

Disconnected how?

Well, our societies a couple of hundred years ago were based on Church, State, Family, and Location. You might want to chuck in Tradition as well. We’ve abandoned the Church, we’re not nearly as unquestioning in our relationship with the State, the family unit is no longer a vast extended sprawl of relatives living on top of one another and culturally speaking many of us don’t see blood as an indivisible bond any longer – and many of these changes have been brought about or enhanced by our physical mobility. Time was when you would almost certainly live your entire life within a fifty mile radius of where you were born, and even if you travelled, you were unlikely to stay away. Now that’s far from certain.

The consequences are many, and many of them are positive, but we have definitely changed the way we live on a fundamental level and we’re having trouble adjusting.

One interesting thing in this context is the rise of Social Media.

We don’t know our neighbours, and we no longer sleep in a big pile like puppies in a box, but we’re making up for it with technology. We’re connecting with one another absolutely frantically (and worrying about it… And while we’re saying “aiee” about that article, can someone explain to me why it’s filed in “women”? The Times is weird. Oh, and, of course, in the grand tradition of editorial integrity, the fact that Twitter is apparently a grave social evil has not stopped them from using it.)

But that wasn’t what I was thinking of when I started this post – that was just the stuff which my brain threw into the preamble when I opened the sluice.

What I was thinking about was connection – because of this tweet from Tim O’Reilly -

I was thinking I liked reading my Kindle 2 as well as a physical book, till I picked up the same book in a nice print edition.

Leaving aside issues of whether or not the Kindle is a decent piece of kit, I think there’s a connection issue here. I think a physical book has a narrative of its own which we appreciate, and a sense of uniqueness, and maybe even a whisper of a connection to the author and to some other people. It has been worked on. In some minimal way, it’s a human object, unmediated and biological.

I know, I’m being a loon. But hear me out…

We’re not just visual animals. We tend to think of ourselves as primarily visual because our eyes are right there next to our brains, and we can see the rest of our bodies further away. And yes, we do rely on our eyes for lots of things. But our other senses are strong, and in a way they’re even more so because we don’t notice them doing their thing. Scent, for example, is closely associated with memory – so that book smell means books, and being a kid, and libraries, and so on. A book which doesn’t smell of book is weird.

We also like to touch. 

When you go to a museum, there are always signs telling you not to – because the most natural thing in all the world would be to reach out and stroke a statue. (Incidentally, a friend of mine was once taken around a museum after hours by a curator who, I suspect, had designs upon her virtue; he invited her to touch the bodies of the classical statues. According to Mr Tactile, Greek sculptors understood anatomy so well that you can feel the difference between their work and later Roman imitations.) The same applies when you visit a live cave – the guides will tell you not to touch the stalactites, because your skin’s acids and such will damage them – but it’s desperately hard to behave. We want to know things by touch.

A paper book has a history.

Somewhere, at some time, an author wrote it all down, printed it out, gave it to an editor, who also worked over it. The book was typset – yes, on a computer, these days, but still – and finally pressed and packaged and distributed. There is a chain of physical events which leads from me to you. With old editions, it’s even more direct. With signed ones, it’s a handshake. We like to connect. And digital books feel as if they’re trapped behind glass. The book is in the machine, and we can’t open the cover and touch the pages.

That’s an illusion, of course – an artifact of how we think about computers. The Kindle has its own narrative – and the digital file has one, too. But we make a distinction, which I think is sound, between the endlessly duplicable digital file and a paper copy which is unique. It’s about a handshake, a connection with the world. We like to be part of something.

I’m delighted by that – I have a sort of fuzzy allegiance to the lifeworld, and I think you can tie Ruskin to it, and Giddens on expert systems… and that’s a story for another day. 

The point is, it strikes me that we feel able to connect to a paper book in a way which, so far, eludes us with electronic ones.