Physical Libraries vs. Digital Archives

Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Prescient Take on the Inimitable Smell of Books

Welcome to Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.

This week: an essay about analog versus digital libraries, inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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With his eyes closed, he feels the echo of the day throughout his body. He recalls the feeling of the acorn in the forest poking out of the soil and nearly piercing his bare left foot. He sees again the thin green shoots supporting white flowers who tilt toward the sun as it arcs into afternoon. He smells the musky pages of the book he opened by the bank, his legs dangling into the stream, cool water running around his ankles.

That day was the sort of day he’d come to call a “feel the Earth beneath your feet” day; a day marked by a sense of embodiment. Living and working the land in the summer, Earth-beneath-your-feet days come easier than they do in the city.

In the city, whose grid mimics an Excel spreadsheet, the experience of a day is fragmented. One may lose her sense of place. When a friend visits my city and takes the metro, we come up from underground and she tells me she has no sense of where we are, and where we’ve traveled. “Under the river,” I say. “Into the city center.” I show her a map, and chart our route through several neighborhoods, tracing the line we followed, hurtling quickly through our tunnel underground.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in her books Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass, indigenous wisdom teaches a view that considers the whole. In this view, the human animal is treated as an extension of the natural world, an agent in the ecosystem. Modern city planning – in the US, at least – paves over green ecosystems to create new environments made of concrete.

There is an essential difference between sensation-integrated systems for learning – like physical libraries – and speedy and sanitized systems for learning – like the internet, which is organized like a city. The difference is beautifully summed up by Giles in Season 1, Episode 8 of the 1997 series Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

From “I Robot, You Jane,” Buffy S1E8. Written by Ashley Gable and Thomas A. Swyden. Series created by Joss Whedon.

There’s an obvious preference, in many cases, for physical media over digital media, especially when it comes to written work. When e-readers hit the scene – starting with early models introduced in 1997, when this episode of Buffy was released – people spoke often about how book disks could never replace physical books.
My aunt always said she preferred the tactile experience of pages to screens, and my roommate and bestie once told me he loves his personal library because he considers it an extension of his physical mind, somewhere he can go to deepen his thoughts on a given subject.

In terms of information retention, books generally help their readers retain information more effectively than book disks, smartphones, laptops and the like. In a 2006 study in Springer, grade five students learned more slowly and efficiently from paper than they did a scrolling screen. The screen allowed the students to digest the information quickly, but at the expense of comprehension. A 2013 piece in Scientific American points out that “most digital devices interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their mind.” Like navigating the city on the metro with a mapping app, “teleporting” to your destination without an awareness of the neighborhoods and topography you’re passing through, reading on a screen is like hiking a trail but watching “the trees, rocks and moss pass by in flashes, with no tangible trace of what came before and no easy way to see what lies ahead.”

With physical books, I also add marginal notes, which help me remember key points and develop deeper thoughts about the material. I could take notes on a laptop, sure, but the feeling of clacking on a keyboard is not the same as the feeling of a ballpoint pen rolling its ink across beige-yellow paper.

If you must learn something from a screen, then the more surface area you can look at, the better the information retention. There’s something about the physical visual field you have while reading that affects the way your brain digests information, according this 2010 study in Computers & Education.

What we know from the history of book burnings is that those who control books control the past, and those who control the past control the present. Narratives that would challenge the powers that wish to be are dangerous, and in order for the powers that wish to be to be, the volumes containing those narratives must be destroyed.

In an age where information is increasingly digitized, what does control of information look like? What does book burning look like in the computer age? Is it a firewall?

And aside from questions about control over information access, how can digital information access the sensational experience of musty, rich books? How can we situate ourselves within digital highways, knowing where our rabbit hole on the internet and began, and where it’s heading? If digital media is devoid of smell, how can it otherwise engage the sensation-driven functions of the brain that make us lean in, and slow down, and remember?

For the artist, it is essential to seek out ways to create libraries that combine the best of the digital and physical worlds, and to generate pathways a public can use to access artwork and information. One of the reasons I love theatre is because audiences are breathing, alive, in the room with the story being performed. When theatre is functioning at its best (which is like 10-20% of the time) it engages all of the senses. There was a great play I saw last year set in a Dominican family’s kitchen, where real aromatics were cooked on stage and instantly brought to mind warm feelings of family, of meals created and shared.

It’s vital to point out too that internet-based information is powerful, and has its place. I don’t advocate for Luddite-ism and a burning down of the internet in favor of paper resources only. The internet also rocks. Access to information once required physical buildings and space, and waiting on inter-library loans to come through. Now all that’s needed to research a given subject is an internet connection. Information is available anywhere, and at any time.

The demon haunting this episode came from a book, and when the book was scanned, got uploaded to the internet. Come on 1997 visions and fears around the internet!

We have to be careful, though. While the gatekeepers of publishing are not perfect, librarians and publishers at least have some curatorial ability, so collections that were available to the public had to go through a vetting process. Now anything can be published – so if the internet remains free, nothing can be censored. This means anyone can publish what they wish, and at best, means our collective capacity for critical thinking will improve as we learn to sort out the jewels from the refuse. At worst, it means harmful content can be distributed and digested without a second thought.

Buffy’s conclusion, not only in Season 1 Episode 8 but also throughout the rest of Season 1 (which is as far as I’ve got at the time of writing, I’m watching it for the first time with my partner), is that both physical resources and digital resources can come together to provide a holistic understanding of a given subject. When the desire arises to dive into a novel, maybe that novel best wraps you up when you hike the paper trail of its pages, knowing subconsciously how much of the journey lies ahead, and what you’ve left behind. When you pass by a tree on the street that’s guarded from dog pee with aggressive signage and cameras, maybe the search engine bests the brick-and-mortar library when it comes to quickly finding out whether dog pee really is bad for trees (according to Bloomberg, it is.)

At the end of “I Robot, You Jane,” in order to banish the demon, computer-whiz teacher and luddite-library teacher work together to cast the incantation that seals the demon away. If we fear the internet, and the algorithm, it’s probably only for its power. Maybe we fear it for the same reasons book burners fear libraries.

If we want to build a better future, one where embodied sensation takes the lead and where everyone has access to information and art, then we need to use the technologies at our disposal as levers to open up higher degrees of understanding.

If you’re a techie, or an artist, or a member of the critically thinking please keep thinking deeply. Help us illuminate the way.