If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist
Kenneth Goldsmith
Presented at Elective Affinities Conference, University of Pennsylvania, September 27, 2005
The following statements are directed at academic production and
should be considered in that context. This does not include painters,
potters, printmakers, book artists or metal workers. Yet.
I'm going to start right out by saying it: If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist.
I used to say this hyperbolically but as time has gone on, it's proved
to be a truism, perhaps the paradigmatic truism of our times.
You might deny this until you realize that much of your
self-worth is derived from Googling yourself; if you don't exist on the
internet, you don't exist.
You get frustrated as I do when you are researching in front of
your computer and what you're looking for doesn't show up on Google.
Perhaps we are at the root of the problem.
It is our obligation as educators and intellectuals to make sure
that the bulk of our production ends up there, preferably with free and
unfettered access to all. This means not making materials available
only for those affiliated with our institution, our students, or our
colleagues, but giving free and unfettered access for all. Doing so
means posting our works on the world wide web so that anyone, anywhere,
at any time can have access to them. In this way, we will ensure that
our work exists.
Problems of Access
Not everyone is able to have access to intellectual materials in
the way that we do. Only a fraction of web users have access to
proprietary subscription services like LexusNexis, ProQuest, or Factiva.
Public libraries, which have limited or no access to these subscription
services, are understaffed and under-funded. Most rural libraries are
in a sorry state. Urban libraries, too, are not faring much better. In
New York City where I live, the local Barnes & Noble is often used
instead of our pitiful public libraries. In the Barnes & Nobles,
consumers are allowed to use books for research purposes without having
to buy them. A typical user will be slung into a soft chair next to a
stack of dog-eared books, sipping a cup of coffee, taking notes on a
laptop. It's a nice idea, but we all know the market-driven limitations
of what Barnes & Noble stocks. Most likely what you've written is
not going to be showing up in a Barnes & Noble any time soon.
I run UbuWeb, a large site dedicated to the free distribution of
generally hard-to-find and out-of-print avant-garde materials. In May
of 2000, I received the following short email at UbuWeb from someone
named Meredith:
i really enjoyed your site. it made me think about different cultures
other than the ones i experience daily living in a small texas town.
I can't imagine that much of UbuWeb's materials are available in
Meredith's local library. Chances are that they don't have much, if any,
sound poetry, and I'll bet that their concrete poetry section is
lacking as well. Odds are that the local Barnes & Noble isn't
chockfull of this stuff either. If Meredith were ambitious, she might
try searching the web and buying these items online. But then she'd have
to fork out $125 to buy a used copy of Emmett Williams' An Anthology of
Concrete Poetry or $90 to purchase the Revue OU box set that compiles
the entire run of the legendary French sound poetry magazine from the
1960s. Those two items comprise a miniscule amount of what's available
to Meredith for free on UbuWeb, right in the comfort of her own living
room. Meredith's note succinctly summed up what I had wished to achieve
with UbuWeb: the creation of a distribution center for out of print,
hard-to-find, small run, obscure materials, available at no cost from
any point on the globe. UbuWeb embraces the distributive possibilities
inherent in the web's original technologies: call it radical forms of
distribution.
And because the original materials that UbuWeb hosts never really made
money in the first place -- coupled with the fact that as sound, video
and textual works, they easily translate to the web environment -- we
can indulge in such high-minded utopian ideals. Certainly the latest
bestseller or how-to book cannot engage in such radical distribution:
the financial stakes are too high. But we are in a unique position --
I'd call it a privileged position -- to be able to give our work away,
ensuring that it exists. When was the last time you received a fat
royalty check for an academic book? You get my point. And with the
advent and subsequent growth of the web, we have our perfect
distribution mechanism.
I'm not saying don't publish on paper. By all means do, but make sure
that your work is available in a non-proprietary digital form as well.
For most of us, the book as physical object has bestowed credibility
upon its author. Again, I can use myself as an example: I love books as
much as anyone and in my CV, I'll cite the number of paper books I have
published, and give only a passing glance at my web publications. I see
myself as being on the cusp of a generation for whom books will
certainly not mean what they have meant for us; ultimately I believe
that books will merely act as a supplement to one's primary online
experience.
Suffice it to say that books aren't disappearing any time soon. Until an
electronic reader is made available that approximates the experience of
reading a book -- a technology that took 500 years to be perfected --
books remain necessary vehicles. Can you imagine taking a laptop to the
beach to read an e-book? Not yet. But it will happen. So for the time
being, our books need to have an online counterpart which extends,
updates or in some way acts as a corollary agent to the paper edition.
Institutional Leverage is on Your Side
What do publishing houses and magazines do for their authors? In our
field, they generally don't make them rich; instead, they create a
context, a framework for the work to exist. The benefits of academic
publication are almost always oblique: credibility, speaking
engagements, job credentials, etc. With the web, we can extend the
benefits of book publishing to enhance both our careers and the
institution with which we are affiliated.
My colleagues Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis are doing just that with
PennSound, an enormous, open-access poetry sound archive. Because of its
affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania, the site immediately
became established as an authoritative distribution center. Charles and
Al have found that it works both ways: Penn lends credibility to
PennSound and PennSound brings a new international audience to Penn.
It's a win-win situation. An independent site can establish itself in
similar ways, but it's much harder and can take a much longer time.
Institutional leverage is on your side.
Oblique but Substantial Benefits
And while we're on the subject of winning, let's look at some of the
benefits of making your work freely accessible. The preeminent literary
critic Marjorie Perloff's author page at the University of Buffalo's
Electronic Poetry Center is stacked years' worth with years her work.
Each year, the content list grows longer. Some of it has been published
before, other essays have appeared in small journals, and much of it
appears exclusively on her page. Marjorie continues to publish books --
often one a year -- but she tells me that most of her speaking
engagements come as solicitations from her web page. Let's face it,
books that traffic in the more arcane aspects of academia are expensive
and often hard to get in many parts of the world. But almost everyone
has access to the web (and if not now, they soon will). From this stems
numerous opportunities.
I, too, have had an experience similar to Marjorie's. Last summer I was
invited on a reading tour of Scandinavia. I read to large and
enthusiastic audiences in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki and met
dozens of fans of my work. Much to my surprise, no one had ever seen any
of the eight books I had published over the past decade. All of these
books had been published by tiny independent publishing houses and were
available for purchase by an equally tiny distributor. The European
context for my work was what was on the internet. I like getting these
invitations, so I make sure to post everything I publish on paper on the
internet. While I have never received one cent from my experimental
writing, due to the web, I have traveled the world extensively with all
expenses paid, garnered honorariums and, most importantly, I've
connected with an interested readership -- a peer group, really -- in an
admittedly obscure endeavor. Without the internet, a writer in my
position would never exist in quite the same way.
The Speed of Academic Blogging
The economic implications of web publishing are obvious by now, as is
the speed with which the transfer and exchange of ideas is happening.
Over the past few years, this tendency has increased with blogging. Even
such established media outlets as The New York Times are requiring
their reporters to blog constantly during the day; the paper that
arrives on your doorstep each morning is hopelessly out of date; it's
truly yesterday's news.
I'm not suggesting that you all become bloggers, but it's good to think
about how long-held academic publishing practices can be questioned in
this strikingly new media environment in which we are immersed. By the
time your book is published, chances are that it might suffer a similar
fate -- or worse -- to this morning's paper edition of The New York
Times. I'm not saying that the field of, say, Romantic literature of the
19th Century moves at the same pace and with the same urgency as the
escalating cost of gasoline, but I do think that we can learn something
-- even if glancing -- from the blogging paradigm.
Like publishing or academic affiliation, blogging creates another type
of community: peer-based consensus garners credibility. Blogging opens
up instantaneous discourse with a group of like-minded thinkers. We all
know of colleagues who post chapters-in-progress of their latest books
on their blogs. Older proprietary ways of thinking would condemn this
practice with the fear that your ideas would be swiped, brought quickly
to the marketplace, rendering your efforts useless. On the contrary,
what happens is the opposite. Like any twelve-step program alumnus
knows: words are deeds. By showing your commitment to these ideas
publicly, they are acknowledged by a given community as being yours. If
it's available to the whole world, then anyone trying to swipe your
ideas will be outed by the public knowledge that you're the one who has
been working on this subject. Academic bloggers find that their
community of readers often act as fact-checkers or engage the blogger in
instantaneous debate over specific points before the book reaches the
concretized state of print. Instant feedback on your work: does it get
any better than that?
The poet Ron Silliman, whose blog has become somewhat of an anchor for
the poetics community, recently marveled at what's happened to him since
in the year since his blog's launch. I'll excerpt from a long list:
- I've had to become more rigorous in my reading, to actually think a little about what to read next & why
- My mental map of contemporary poetry has changed profoundly
- I've had to acknowledge the presence of an entirely new
generation of poets & recognize that they really are the "poets of
today," however you might care to define that.
- I've met, online & sometimes later in person, a huge number
of interesting new people & gotten to know several folks I'd
already met quite a bit better
- My correspondence has gone up dramatically
- So has the arrival of books in the mail - twenty books in one week is not uncommon.
- I've been able to spread the word about some poetry I care about a lot.
- My own poetry is being solicited at a much greater rate than I can possibly manage.
- I'm being invited to read more often - so much so, in fact,
that I've learned to say No for the first time in my life. I've turned
down trips to Oregon, Finland & several places in between as a
result.
- Writing here has pushed my own poetry forward in ways I would
not have expected & which I don't think (yet) I can fully
articulate.
In yet another sense, for Ron and for millions of others, if it doesn't
exist on a blog, it doesn't exist -- so much so that Google has just
launched it's own Blog Search, which indexes blog listings as they
happen. Yet one more way to check your existence, minute-to-minute.
CDs are Dead
I will now make another claim you are sure to find outrageous: CDs are
dead. As a matter of fact, all static, non-networked media is dead. This
includes CDs and DVDs, which are quickly going the way of the zip
drive. There used to be a claim that a non-networked computer -- a
stand-alone workstation -- was really not a computer. The thinking --
correct in my opinion -- went: if it's not networked, it doesn't exist;
if it's not able to be shared, it doesn't exist. Older media needs to be
digitized in order to exist.
Again, I'll use myself as a case in point. Nobody loved rummaging
through used record stores like me. I have over 10,000 LPs to show for
it and an equal number of CDs. For thirty-five years, most of my spare
time was spent hunting down discs. But these days, I rarely open a
gatefold of my beloved LPs and even more rarely do I crack a jewel case.
Instead, I turn to my hard drive which is stacked with many more MP3s
than my physical space can hold. And the thrill of the hunt remains:
everything on my drive was procured through web-browsing or
file-sharing.
And sharing is the operative word. I feel that my LPs are now only truly
valuable (read: socially) when they are digitally transferred and
shared. Otherwise they sit on my shelf, a slab of vinyl for the
enjoyment of me and my three fetishist, nostalgic friends. My
reel-to-reel and cassette tapes suffer a worse fate as the they
literally degrade with each passing day.
Businesses that are flourishing today like Netflix are finished; they
use the web as an interface for distributing singular copies of material
objects, but in failing to distribute the actual intellectual materials
on the web, they are already doomed. See how different iTunes and its
success is. Because they distribute digital content on the web, they are
succeeding wildly. Obviously, given time and sufficient bandwidth,
Netfilx and their competitors will migrate to the web. Again, iTunes
knows that if it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist.
Like iTunes the BBC knows better. Their interactive Media Player will
use peer-to-peer technology to deliver hours of TV and radio content
completely legally and free of charge. But the big hitch is their
restriction on the content which prevents it being played beyond seven
days from its original broadcast date. Major media concerns have an
interest in digital materials "expiring" after a certain date. With
iTunes proprietary AAC format, there is a limit to how many times a file
can be copied before it expires. Fair enough. Commercial is commercial.
However, what we're interested in is unrestricted access to
non-commercial, educational materials. So, in this instance by exist, I
mean something exists when it can be shared, altered and re-circulated.
Proprietary materials that do not live within this eco-system -- even
when compromised by time-stamped "expiration" -- are doomed to wither
into oblivion.
The New Radicalism
In concluding, I'm going to drop a real secret on you. Used to be that
if you wanted to be subversive and radical, you'd publish on the web,
bypassing all those arcane publishing structures at no cost. Everyone
would know about your work at lightening speed; you'd be established and
garner credibility in a flash, with an adoring worldwide readership.
Shhhh... the new radicalism is paper. Right. Publish it on a printed
page and no one will ever know about it. It's the perfect vehicle for
terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general. In
closing, if you don't want it to exist -- and there are many reasons to
want to keep things private -- keep it off the web.
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