The Book and its Discontents: Truth, Information, and the Deathing of the Book

Since the late 1980s, popular and academic writers, have engaged in a rhetorical phenomenon titled the death of the book or the book is dead. The repetition of these headlines indicate the anxieties brought about by the sudden imposition of a radically different communications technology and the effects it has imposed on the practice of every-day living. This study seeks to deepen this commonplace trope and examine the reasons behind its appearance and its prevalent use during digital times. It opens with an investigation of a similar nineteenth century discussion known as the end of the book, and historicizes a sustained and masculine dissatisfaction with the book that begins with Thomas Edison. The following chapters undertake an in depth history of the death of the book, interrogating the technologies that appeared following the 1870s, all of which sought to divorce the written word from the instantiations of ink and paper and to divert text into metal-based, often electrically-driven machines. Along with the trope of the death of the book, this dissertation maps the construction of a techno-positivist media narrative that seeks to unseat the book from its privileged position in the everyday life of Western societies. This narrative is coupled with the popular death of the book narrative to interrogate how both seek to domesticate and conceal the devastating consequences of the manufacture and disposal of electro-digital technologies. Consequently, the appearance of death of the book or the book is dead headlines are investigated as strategic tactics that cover up the death of computer technology, and the destabilizing effects that have followed in the wake of its imposition. Finally, this work locates the death of the book within a shift between truth with its epistemological freight and information which is understood to be free of such freight, and is routinely presented instead as objective, even raw. It explores how these conceptions contribute toward a repositioning of the book, not as a dead or superannuated technology, but as a guerilla technology, a tool of resistance and insubordination, capable of existing outside the power and surveillance capabilities of a digital empire.