Recreating Civilizations: The Future of Publishing

“The critical faculty that selects meaning from chaos is part of our instinctual equipment, and so is the gift for creating and recreating civilizations and their rules without external guidance.”
In Book Business, Jason Epstein details the rise and, at least as we know it, the fall of the book publishing industry. He concludes by saying that the future of publishing on the horizon will harness the power of the Internet as never before. Amid this cogent thesis lies the idea that human beings instinctually attempt to draw order from chaos and that this ‘new age’ in publishing does not change this basic fact. Epstein writes, “Without a vivid link to the past, the present is chaos and the future unreadable.” Book publishing in the days to come will come transpire as a result of the human propensity to recreate civilizations once they are destroyed.
Chapter Seven introduces to the reader Norman Wiener, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, whom Epstein had published and had come to know. Epstein says, “Powerful metaphors linking his theoretical work to the visible world flowed easily from his mind”. He then goes on to discuss the second law of thermodynamics, which “posits the inexorable deterioration of closed systems in nature as their temperatures become increasingly uniform with that of their surroundings over time”. In simple terms, when people can no longer assimilate energy, they become dust. Unless new energy is fed into a closed system, it will deteriorate.
As a way of clarifying the second law, Wiener used the metaphor of a salmon swimming upriver to spawn new life. “The salmon’s struggle stands for the temporary victory of life, art, and morality over the vast force arrayed against it”, Epstein writes. Wiener foreshadowed the technological future, the Internet, in his use of such metaphors. He describes an “all-encompassing feedback loop”, in effect, a global feedback system. Publishing itself will never become obsolete; only certain methods of publishing will decline.
Last class we discussed the ‘scene’ and the ‘network’ as audiences that are changing with the advent of social networking via the Internet. The forces of life will prove victorious and our links to the past will remain because of the ways that the publishing industry is evolving. The counterentropic value of interactivity as a source of cultural renewal is a powerful image and carries great weight in the present moment.