5. Why Even Scholars Don’t Get a Free Lunch in Cyberspace
5.4. Why Paperlessness Is No Panacea
3. Encourage authors toward the textbook market, which forces them to write accessibly and incorporate innovations into the curriculum.
4. Restrict authors’ ability to recycle material (e.g., by holding the copyright to the work), thereby forcing them either to target their message to particular audiences or to develop novel impli- cations of their research.
Publishers as Reactive
1. The research function of marketing is reduced to targeting:
䊏 Two courses with 500 students each is better than 1000 glob- ally dispersed scholars
䊏 Big advances to “big names” who function as “market attractors”
2. If a new journal manages to find a market niche, it is encour- aged indefinitely, as long as it provides return on investment.
There is no publisher-based incentive for cognitive euthanasia of a “cash cow.”
3. As book prices rise and copyright becomes more restrictive, courses increasingly rely on just one all-purpose textbook, which effectively curbs the incentive of publishers to support innovation—thereby reversing the main intellectual benefit of the Gutenberg Revolution, which was to create a presumption that prior research would be within easy reach of readers (Eisenstein 1979).
4. Copyright and other publisher restrictions encourage academics to think of their work as consisting of discrete products rather than as an ongoing process, in which the same points may be raised in different conversations.
customers, who ultimately absorb these costs. But to refuse the ser- vices of publishers in favor of posting one’s works on the World Wide Web would hardly reduce the amount of paper consumed. All it would do is diffuse the source of paper consumption, as each person prints out materials downloaded from the Web onto his or her own personal computer. Pool (1983, 189–225) has argued that the flight from hard copy to virtual copy will actually increase the amount of paper consumed, the costs of which will be borne either by the indi- vidual user or by the institution that maintains the user’s computer.
Of course, it may be that these costs will turn out to be less than the ones currently passed on to consumers by publishers. In that case, we would see the continuation of the “Xerox effect,” whereby increased paper consumption (i.e., number of photocopies) is accom- panied by lower overall costs to the consumer.
However, even this prognosis is probably hasty, since people use computers at least as much to produce text as to retrieve it. When scholars still worked on typewriters, it was common to write suc- cessive rounds of corrections on the margins of a single paper draft, saving the generation of a second paper draft for the final, “clean”
version. The advent of computers has altered scholarly sensibilities about paper use, so that now it is common to generate a new paper draft for each round of corrections, and to store the final, “clean”
copy in cyberspace. Admittedly, this development is very much in keeping with the Cyberplatonist view that the ideal form belongs in a place that transcends corruptible matter—but to get there, it seems that the Cyberplatonist needs to wade through more, not less, of the corrupt papyrus than the scholarly typist used to.
Can this attachment to paper be severed simply with an extended lesson in the latest computer applications? The answer is no—and the reasons do not require imagining the average computer user to be an idiot. Paper persists, not out of nostalgia or unexamined habit, but out of genuine convenience and, more importantly, risk man- agement. It remains rational to keep generating hardcopy as long as computer systems crash as often as they do and remain as vulnera- ble to playful and not-so-playful viral intruders. Only once those problems are tackled will it make sense to embark on a campaign to wean computer users away from their attachment to paper. More generally, the liberatory rhetoric associated with scholars posting their works on the World Wide Web “free to all” will become a literal reality only once all scholars have (and retain, through changes in
the political economy) unimpeded access to the Internet. Until that time, the postal service remains the most “equalizing” medium for communicating with fellow scholars, however much we may wish it to be otherwise.
The illusion of a frictionless medium of thought is also kept alive at the phenomenological level by the hidden institutional costs of maintaining the average scholar’s computer system. Simply put, if you don’t personally pay the costs, you treat them as if they weren’t there. Consider this bit of Cyberplatonist “analysis”: “When things get cheap enough, they get absorbed into the overheads. Does your department charge you for every pencil you take from the office?
Back two decades ago, when I was graduating, it was common for universities to have strict accounting of long-distance calls. . . . Nowadays, with telephone call costs lower, charges up to some limit are typically absorbed into the general overheads” (Odlyzko 1995).
This testimony, unsurprisingly, comes from someone who works at an Ivy League university, not a community college. The situation is even worse for such financially vulnerable institutions as primary and secondary schools because an unusually large percentage of their transmissions contain multimedia imagery, which travel in large packets that can easily congest the Internet, regardless of the speed at which they are transmitted (Fuchs 1996). Encouraged by both public and private sector investment in the 1980s and early 1990s, schools built substantial information infrastructures that ultimately aimed to meet all of their instructional needs. At that time, school administrators were led to believe that government would either continue subsidizing the information infrastructure or regulate the markets in which it is transacted. However, the advent of Internet privatization has thrown this tacit commitment into doubt, leaving schools literally adrift in the aethernet.
Ultimately, the ideal of a frictionless medium of thought is based on one of the many philosophical distinctions—in this case, between medium and message—that fails to make a material difference.
Harnad’s very insistence that the Internet is necessary for future aca- demic productivity unwittingly betrays the fact that scholars already depend on this particular medium for transmitting their thoughts, so that it would be difficult for the scholarly community to revert to another medium, should Internet accessing fees rise significantly for universities (as in the case of Carnegie Mellon University, whose fees jumped from $30,000 to $300,000 per year with the privatization of
the Internet). Universities would either have to make scholars bear the costs themselves on the model of rents (as in the Scandinavian practice of deducting rent on university office space from the monthly salary) or ration Internet access by some formula that will probably be to the advantage of scholars whose productivity has already been enhanced by electronic communication.
Either scenario would bear witness to what in the previous chapter I called the commodification of knowledge, or the hidden political economy of public goods. In the case of the Internet, there are at least two other ways of capturing the dependency of thought on medium.
(a) Successive technologies tend to be more expensive than the ones they replace, even though their own costs tend to go down over time.
Thus, while computers drop in price, they are still more expensive than typewriters, which are, in turn, still more expensive than pens.
In economists’ terms, the “entry costs” for each new technology are higher, thereby potentially disenfranchising a larger segment of the population each time around. Of course, computers are much more versatile than typewriters or pens, but the additional power provided by computers had not been constitutive of normative scholarly prac- tice when typewriters or pens were the dominant medium of knowl- edge production. Rather, scholarly norms adapted to the capacities of the new technologies, and so we see Harnad extolling the virtues of a quick turnaround time in editorial judgment, as if that had been a scholarly desideratum down through the ages, when in fact its desir- ability is intimately linked with the “Publish or Perish” imperative of contemporary academic survival.
(b) Information industries tend to converge on all sectors of the information market (Pool 1983, 23–54). Whereas in 1880, one could still identify distinct firms that fell along the orthogonal axes of “products versus services” and “content versus conduit,” today, largely as a result of the revolution in electronic communications, an historically service-oriented firm such as American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) competes in every sector with an historically product-oriented firm such as International Business Machines (IBM) (Cronin 1988). Given this history of categorical fluidity, publishers should have little trouble adjusting their raison d’etre in cyberspace from that of manufacturing a product to that of providing a service—
especially if publishing houses continue to be sold to newspaper
chains with multinational interests in providing financial services and cable communications (Aitkenhead 1995). Moreover, the integrity of books and journals—let alone the distinction between them—may yield to the customized pay-per-view world of hypertext and Web links, which, if anything, will diminish the likelihood that anyone will possess a complete text of any single work. Rather, once pub- lishers colonize cyberspace, it will be more common to have personal access to the equivalent of several photocopied pages of many dif- ferent works that have been consulted for specific research needs.