Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

254 Pages·2011·1.86 MB·English

by  Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Planned Obsolescence
This page intentionally left blank
Planned Obsolescence
Publishing, Technology, and
the Future of the Academy
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2011 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 1967–
Planned obsolescence : publishing, technology, and the
future of the academy / Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8147–2787–4 (acid-free paper)
ISBN 978–0–8147–2788–1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978–0–8147–2896–3 (ebook)
1. Scholarly publishing—United States. 2. Scholarly electronic
publishing—United States. 3. Communication in learning and
scholarship—Technological innovations—United States. I. Title.
Z286.S37F58 2011
070.50973—dc23 2011024719
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Obsolescence 1
1 Peer Review 15
Traditional Peer Review and Its Defenses 18
The History of Peer Review 20
The Future of Peer Review 23
Anonymity 27
Credentialing 30
The Reputation Economy 32
Community-Based Filtering 38
MediaCommons and Peer-to-Peer Review 43
Credentialing, Revisited 47
2 Authorship 50
The Rise of the Author 57
The Death of the Author 60
From Product to Process 66
From Individual to Collaborative 72
From Originality to Remix 76
From Intellectual Property to the Gift Economy 80
From Text to . . . Something More 83
3 Texts 89
Documents, E-books, Pages 93
Hypertext 95
Database-Driven Scholarship 100
Reading and the Communications Circuit 104
CommentPress 109
| v
4 Preservation 121
Standards 129
Metadata 137
Access 144
Cost 152
5 The University 155
Publishing, Not for Profit 157
New Collaborations 166
Publishing and the University Mission 171
The History of the University Press 175
The Press as University Publisher 178
Sustainability 184
Conclusion 188
Notes 197
Bibliography 213
Index 231
About the Author 245
vi | Contents
Acknowledgments
The spirit of collaboration for which I advocate in this book—col-
laboration that extends beyond coauthorship to include a host of reading,
reviewing, and project-development practices—is a key aspect of the ethos of
the digital humanities, and as such, the list of people to whom I owe a debt of
gratitude for the ways that this project developed is extensive.
Without the initial support of the Institute for the Future of the Book, its founder
Bob Stein, and the creative and critical folks who have worked there in varying
capacities, including Ben Vershbow, Dan Visel, Jesse Wilbur, and Eddie Tejeda,
neither this project nor MediaCommons would ever have gotten off the ground.
Similarly, the support and encouragement I received throughout the writ-
ing, review, and revision process from New York University Press have made
the seemingly impossible happen. Eric Zinner and Monica McCormick
repeatedly surprised me not just with their openness to my wacky ideas but
their creative thinking about how to press those ideas further than I’d have ever
imagined. I’d also like to extend a particular thanks to Lisa Spiro, one of the
two fantastic reviewers whom the press selected for the manuscript; not only
was her review thorough, unflinching, and extraordinarily helpful, but she also
agreed to participate in our open review experiment, allowing her report to
be made public and commentable alongside the manuscript. This generosity is
precisely the kind that I hope we can cultivate throughout the profession.
A range of colleagues made crucial contributions to this project, via Twitter
discussions, conference conversations, lecture invitations, and general prod-
ding, including Maria Bonn, Maria Bustillos, George Carr, Dan Cohen, Cathy
Davidson, Neil Fraistat, Matthew Gold, Alexander Halavais, Jason Jones, Alex
Juhasz, Shana Kimball, Matt Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, Tara McPherson, Julie
Meloni, Nick Mirzoeff, Jason Mittell, Bethany Nowviskie, Gloria Origgi, Phil
Pochoda, Katherine Rowe, Abby Smith Rumsey, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Michele
White, George Williams, Mark Wollaeger, Paul Young, and Vika Zafrin.
I am also indebted to all of those readers whose comments in the online
review process helped me clarify my ideas; I particularly want to single out
| vii
Cheryl Ball, Natalia Cecire, Barbara Fister, Michael Roy, and Julie Levin
Russo for their thoughtful readings. Even more particularly, I thank Amanda
French, David Parry, and Dorothea Salo, whose careful attention to the man-
uscript as a whole, and whose generous contributions to an atmosphere of
discussion and engagement, helped make the online review process a terrific
success.
Further thanks for making the online review possible go to Christian
Wach, who continues to work on the CommentPress system originally devel-
oped by Eddie Tejeda for the Institute for the Future of the Book, and who
was inordinately patient with a range of annoying questions and problems
that I presented him with; I also owe JQuery master Jeremy Boggs a round of
thanks for the nifty rollover footnote script he whipped up for me.
This project was started at the end of one sabbatical, wrapped up at the
start of another, and largely written during the summers in between. I am
grateful to Pomona College for the sabbatical and research support that I
have received, and to my students and colleagues there for challenging my
thinking about the future of digital publishing. I’m especially thankful to
Kevin Dettmar, Jennifer Friedlander, Dara Regaignon, and Meg Worley for
their support and encouragement in this process. I am also grateful to the
NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for its hospitality
during the final stages of bringing the manuscript together.
Finally, to my partner in everything, Rick Blackwood: thanks for all of it,
and here’s to much, much more.
Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in other
venues, and thanks are due for the permission to reprint them here:
Part of the introduction is drawn from my essay in the May 2008 issue of
PMLA and is reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association
of America; that material has also been published in different form in the
winter/spring 2011 ADE Bulletin and is reprinted by permission of the Asso-
ciation of Departments of English.
Part of chapter 1 is drawn from my essay in the winter 2009 issue of Cin-
ema Journal, and an early version of that chapter was published in the fall
2010 issue of Social Epistemology.
An early version of chapter 3 appeared on MediaCommons and in the fall
2007 issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Early drafts of many of this book’s arguments appeared on a range of
blogs, including Planned Obsolescence, MediaCommons, The Valve, and
if:book; thanks to their editors for the platform they provided.
viii | Acknowledgments
Introduction: Obsolescence
The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its
place.
—Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”
In many cases, traditions last not because they are excellent, but
because influential people are averse to change and because of
the sheer burdens of transition to a better state.
—Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
The text you are now reading, whether on a screen in draft form or
in its final, printed version, began its gestation some years ago in a series of
explorations into the notion of obsolescence, which culminated in my being
asked to address the term as part of the workshop “Keywords for a Digital
Profession,” organized by the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students
at the December 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in
Chicago. However jaded and dispiriting the grad students’ choice of “obso-
lescence” as a keyword describing their own futures might appear, the deci-
sion to assign me this keyword was entirely appropriate. My work has circled
the notion of obsolescence for quite a while, focusing on the concept as a
catch-all for multiple cultural conditions, each of which demands different
kinds of analysis and response. As I said at the MLA workshop, we too often
fall into a conventional association of obsolescence with the death of this or
that cultural form, a linkage that needs to be broken, or at least complicated,
if the academy is going to take full stock of its role in contemporary culture
and its means of producing and disseminating knowledge. For instance, the
obsolescence that I focused on in my first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence:
The American Novel in the Age of Television, is not, or at least not primar-
ily, material in nature; after all, neither the novel in particular, nor the book
more broadly, nor print in general is “dead.” My argument in The Anxiety of
Obsolescence is, rather, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms
often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the object
| 1