Tools of Disruption
As an ongoing project, I’m interested in the concept of disruption*, particularly as it relates to the future of books. Here’s a starting list of what I’d call disruptive books, helpfully compiled by conservative movement, Human Events. It’s titled The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:- The Communist Manifesto
- Mein Kampf
- Quotations from Chairman Mao
- The Kinsey Report
- Democracy and Education (John Dewey)
- Das Kapital
- The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan)
- The Course of Positive Philosophy (Auguste Comte)
- Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
- General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes)
By broad definition, what our fearful guardians of tradition and social order call harmful could also be called disruptive, so this is a handy little list to get started on. And looking over this list, I would argue that no *anything* was more socially disruptive in the 19th and 20th century (in the West, at least), than the words in these ten books. Little wonder that some folks want to burn the little buggers.
But are books still as disruptive as they always were? What was the most disruptive book of the past ten years? Was The God Delusion as disruptive as On the Origin of the Species (which, incredibly, didn’t make Human Events’ top ten)? Let’s assume that society is still continually being disrupted, or as susceptible to disruption as it always was. And let’s also assume that books aren’t as disruptive as they once were. What will take their place?
There’s nothing inherent about the book that makes it particularly good at disseminating ideas, except that it’s fairly cheap and portable. Websites (which I’ll broadly define as online content providers), on the other hand, are cheaper and more portable, they enable readers to connect and discuss ideas — which was instrumental for the ideas in our list of disruptive books to move from being words on a page to forming the foundation of social movements — and better still, websites aren’t flammable.
So perhaps a website, or many users and websites linked together in an ongoing conversation, will be the future of disruptive media. There are a ton of options online — YouTube serials, interactive games, wiki mashups — and they all offer more than a stack of bound paper pages.
Clearly, online technologies can and do disrupt society, and do so in ways beyond just providing information. But I’m not convinced they’ll supplant books entirely as a source of social disruption. In fact, books will continue to be disruptive because of their drawbacks. I’d argue that the Communist Manifesto benefited because it couldn’t be discussed until after it was published. It wasn’t analysed or ‘modelled’ or hypothesised by the society at large — it was what it was on the page, and will be forever. Its immutability made it authoritative. Got a problem with it? Burn it or go write your own book.
So, what’s the future of books as disruptive media? I started out trying to answer that question, but I think the question itself is wrong. Instead, we should be trying to figure out what social disruption is, how it works, and then, what kind of device is most appropriate to cause the most disruption. And that’s probably the subject for another post.
Or perhaps I’ll write a book…
* I refer to social disruption as one would refer to ‘technological disruption’. But where disruptive technologies displace and eventually replace established technologies, socially disruptive books spark or contribute to ‘idea movements’.
