Elias Crim is the founding editor of Online Access Magazine and is a publishing executive in Chicago. He is a former regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is elias@ais.net.

A review of: Avatars of the Word by James J. O'Donnell Harvard U.P., 1998

Avatars of the Word

Now here is an author with an interesting rhetorical question: "Is it not strange that we take the spoken word, the most insubstantial of human creations, and try to freeze it forever? Or to try to give the frozen words of those who are dead and gone, or at least far absent, control over our own experience of the lived here and now?"

Thus one James J. O'Donnell, a fellow evidently very bright about late Latin antiquity but definitely on the flicker when the subject turns to the knowability of anything true or permanent.

A man from the old world ¿ and the new

His Avatars of the Word has some interest because of the author's double role as a professor of classics and a vice provost for information systems at the University of Pennsylvania, a man with credentials in both the old and the new technologies of the word, capable of surveying the expanse of time between the (early medieval) codex page and the homepage.

In search of analogous moments to our own, O'Donnell reviews earlier revolutions of the word such as the Greek shift from oral to written culture around the fifth century B.C., the early medieval shift from the papyrus roll to the monastic codex (between the second and fifth centuries A.D.), and finally the move from manuscripts to the printed book.

Before we go any further, let me note, to the author's credit, that he does not view the Internet as a vast virtual library. Not yet, at any rate. He points out the Net's comparative deficiencies -- its lack of any organized cataloging, no commitment to preservation, no "support staff," no real filters on what it "acquires."

Yet, for a man whose entire training and intellectual orientation should qualify him as "logocentric" (i.e., an adherent of the view that words signify something real and meaningful, possibly even true), O'Donnell has a curiously post-modern and ironic sense of where we're going. What he calls the "high dignification" of western civilization -- i.e., our tradition of a certain style and order in communications and expression -- is likely finished, as befits a form of social control (in the author's view) that may have to make way for a new "world beyond ideology."

After all, it turns out that our ideas of earlier civilizations are really just a collection of spurious self-images concocted to justify our power relationships. (Pop quiz: Based on the previous sentence, what year would you guess the author was born? Around 1950? Bingo!)

O'Donnell muses at one point, "It is a usefully gloomy fact that the failure of the dream of western civilization has left us a culture with no ideas." While a cynic might say this book offers some supporting evidence of the latter thesis, I find it a bit too fashionably radical.

Still, O'Donnell is pinning his hopes on the future rushing at us, and thus despair is not in order. Suppose the frequently cited alternatives of relentless progress versus a relapse into barbarity might both give way to a third possibility just coming into view, when "the advance of science will be overtaken by the advance of play," as an economy of amusement replaces the economy of material sustenance, and Net culture defeats the traditional dignification of intellectual activity. (Another lovely phrase here is "the hegemony of the solemn," which is -- happily, of course -- breaking down, in the author's view.)

O'Donnell tries to maintain an agnostic view of this Disney-esque nightmare, despite what it portends for his own vocation.

In fact, he is relatively cheerful about the voracious nature of digital culture's inroads into traditional reading and thinking, even suggesting that in the universities of the near future, professors will be so many software icons: "Click on the professor, and let him take you to the world that he knows."

In some ways, we've been here before, he argues, citing the early medieval codices' elements of "non-linear access," etc.

Change or die

Thus O'Donnell's advice to his fellow members of the professoriat, is essentially change or die. No right-minded union boss would tell his traditionally trained members anything different. And our author seems to view the "life of the mind" in purely economic, mechanistic terms.

For example, O'Donnell notes that the term "intellectual property" is now (gratefully) an oxymoron, and originally was no more than a mechanism by which authors could be compensated.

He is enthusiastic about at least one aspect of the current state of universities: "We academics have been on the front line of computing and networks." This is a competitive advantage, O'Donnell judges, "that we would be fools to squander."

Lacking any common vision ("metanarrative," in the jargon), job security is about the best our professors can hope for. After all, O'Donnell reflects wryly, "Only sects have metanarratives now."