The Problem With Nostalgia

I love Alberto Manguel. I loved A History of Reading. I love where he's coming from and what he represents: a love of the printed word and everything that surrounds it, libraries and the beauty of the act of reading itself. More than Sven Birkerts, Manguel is passionate about his cause (I hate to reduce them both to stereotypes, but Sven is Scandinavian and Alberto is Mediterranean). However, he does himself a slight injustice in his piece in the Week In Review section of the Times called "The Pursuit of Knowledge, From Genesis to Google".

All in all, it is an eloquent and beautiful paean to the idea of the library, the magic of the physical space which holds books and human knowledge, an idea which faded one step further into the past with the announcement that Google would begin digitizing parts of some of the world's most prestigious libraries and offering them up to be freely searchable online. There is a lament in Manguel's assessment of the news peg: that "we don't know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed in a 2004 CD." It seems a minor point, but it cuts the thread of his piece which connects the announcement to his larger ode to the library. Google will not be, as far as I can tell, burning these books to CDROM. The data will be stored in cheap hard drives in some sort of database, duplicated and backed up repeatedly. In a sense, it will exist in the solid state of thousands of hard drives. This is the problem with critiques of technology in general: in order to criticize something, you have to understand it first, and in order to understand it, you have to cultivate a certain degree of fascination with it in order to grasp fully what is going on inside the machine.