Book Burning

Oskar Werner, Julie Christie.. ahead of their time… until now.. maybe

The opening credits for Francoise Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451 (based on the Ray Bradbury novel) are done in voice over.

They are done that way because the film imagines a world without books.

In the film, they burn them. They are viewed as dangerous.

Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary announced that henceforth, it’s new editions (this will be only the third since 1879) will no longer be in books. They will all be online.

We don’t burn our books. We just decide not to make them any more.

Now, we all understand the basic economics of moving a print operation to online.  It’s cheaper. And it can be updated instantly. Not so woth text.

The first OED, begun in 1879 was not published until 1928. That was how long it took them to get the book(s) ready.  Sir Jame Murray, the driving force behind the OED and his staff had decided to publish the world’s first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. In 18709 they thought it would take about 5 years to assemble all the information they needed to get from ‘a’ to ‘zyxt’ (an old Kentish word meaning ‘to see’.

They were wrong. By the end of the first five years, they were only at ‘ant’.

It would, in fact,  take 71 years to finish the first edition of the OED.

Those were the days.

The second edition, all 22 volumes was released in 1989.

Now it seems the Third Edition is going to live only in cyberspace.

This of course, as we all know, is progress.

Well, maybe.

There is something slightly unsettling about having something so ‘solid’ as the OED in such a non-solid form. Where is it, exactly? And what happens if something goes wrong with the servers? In the 1970s, The BBC, in an attempt to ‘preserve’ the Domesday Book had a version created on optical disc – the very cutting edge content technology of the day, and at a cost of several million pounds.  Today, the optical discs are unreadable – there are no working optical disc readers in the country.  Yet the original printed version is still around. (Not that I want to appear as a troglodyte).

Which takes me back to Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.

The movie, made in 1966, was way ahead of its time and is far more timely today, but in a strange way.

While Oskar Werner and everyone else was busy burning books, the all-consuming fascination for the world of Fahrenheit 451 was the flat screen TV sets (very futuristic in 1966) where everyone spent all day watching ‘The Family’, a deadingly boring endless show about ‘average people just like you’.

Non threatening. Friendly.

Truffaut predicted reality TV in 1966…

How shockingly similar this is to our own ‘Real Housewives’ series, or any of the other ‘reality’ crap that dominates the tube.

While we are busy ‘burning’ books, so to speak, we are also mesmerized by the ‘achievements’ of non-achieving people.

Just like the movie.

Just like the book.

Scary stuff….

So, yes, moving the OED to online and cyberspace is certainly a benchmark for the transformation of our culture. As clear a benchmark, I think, as the printing of the first edition. Something is clearly happening here. I am just not so sure it is all for the good.