Tom Guarriello tours his library of 1,270 books to argue that video, music, and other media aren't replacing books but re-elevating older forms of expression that writing once pushed aside. He calls for tools to index video the way we index books, so non-readers have equal access to ideas.
You know, guys, usually this is the view you have of my office, you know, something like this. Every once in a while you'll get a look at my computer and my, my work area where I'm here. But today I want to take you on a little trip. We're going to do a little road trip, and the road trip we're going to take today— stay tuned now as we go down the hallway here past some of the photos. In the photo gallery. And then we're going to make a left, and we're going to make a left and go into a place that I think maybe you've only been in maybe once before, and that is my library. Yeah, this is my library. Now, these are not all of my books. But there are a lot of my books. I'll show you some more. And goes around to the other side of the room and open up these, the bottom of these cabinets, and you'll see there's more books and And there's more books over on the other side of the library. There's, there's a lot of books in here. There's, uh, I have a, um, a program that helps me keep track of all my books, and I'll tell you how many there are in a minute, at least in this room, but there's a lot. So why did I do that? Why did I take you on a tour to see my library? Not to brag about the number of books that I have. I can guarantee you that I have a lot of books. My Delicious Library software tells me I have 1,270 books in my library, probably more or less, and not necessarily every one in there. And then, you know, I know thousands more throughout the house because We love books. The point that I wanted to make was that this ancient heritage, this relationship we have with books, which has given us a tremendous amount of cultural richness throughout our species' history, has also come at the expense of diminishing those ways of communicating and expressing ourselves that do not take place in books. Pictures, sounds. Yes, we have great songs. Yes, we have great art. Yes, we have great cartoons. But in the main, unless the way of using those other media are artistic, we don't value them very highly. We don't value the, um, the ability to speak and communicate very effectively, we don't value that quite as highly as we value the ability to refine words and write them in a book. But I think that's changing. I think we're coming up to a point now in the evolution of our culture where This medium, the video medium, used as a, a medium of expression for everyday people to talk about our lives together, is enriching our ability to appreciate what it takes to be able to do this and to cultivate the ability to do it. If there weren't printing presses and if the book had not become what the book became by means of the technology that's been available to produce, distribute, purchase, and interact with, read books, then books would not have developed into what they've become. Now that the capability to produce, edit, distribute, interact with other kinds of communicative media—video, music, all kinds of non-verbal, in the sense of non-written word, ways. Now that these technologies are developing and being distributed so widely, and that the ability to interact with them has now become commonplace every day— any of us can, can look at things, as many things as we want, all the time— what is that doing to enrich now our appreciation of these kinds of means of communication, not to the diminishment of the book, but to augment the book, not to take it somehow from this perfectly exalted spot that the book has held for, I don't know, uh, how long, uh, 1,000 years, uh, around that, uh, and, and now to appreciate again, maybe, not maybe, what are by necessity older ways of communicating with one another. After all, spoken language preceded written language. Our ancestors communicated with one another orally and understood one another's language before we were able to capture those ideas and feelings in to symbolic form. So we're, in some ways, we're returning to an older way of communicating by taking up these media that have been, for many reasons— technical, political, on and on and on— diminished vis-à-vis writing in the book. We're now at a point where we can reappreciate the importance of being able to communicate in non-written ways. I think it's a tremendous development in our cultural history that we're about to now, I think, reappreciate what's possible in a non-written way because of this ability that we all have now to interact with one another in these non-written forms. And for those of us who were never given to the book in the first place, we didn't read very well, we didn't like to read, we didn't write very well, we didn't write— like to write, suddenly now there's a whole new way of saying, "I have something to say, here's what it is," and to value those things. There's the issue of being— of access. You know, one of the things that has made the book such a tremendously popular item of disseminating cultural value and information is its accessibility. You go to a book, you go to a shelf, you take the book you want from the shelf, you turn to the page you want, you find what you want. All of that has been enabled by a, a suite of technologies: indexing, bookmaking, binding, shelving materials, all of that's been enabled by those things. Now what we need are the tools to enable us to be able to decode the information that's contained in video form such that we can do it the same way as we can do it with books. Look, this stuff I think is a pretty important step in cultural history. And I'm really interested in your thoughts about this, your experience. And so let me know. See you again soon. Take it easy. Bye.
