Research-librarian John-Wilhelm Flattun reviews Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century by Alessandro Ludovico. In the digital era of reading and writing — where new forms are constantly emerging old traditions wither away — how can we navigate the ever-changing landscape of publishing?
Tactical Publishing is foremost a story about the history of modern publishing in all its guises and with a plethora of histories about the diversity of individual artists and creators. Though its opening aim of reclaiming a humanistic approach is a continuous undertow throughout, it is Ludovico’s brilliant anecdotal storytelling outlining the evolution of both reading and writing in a modern world in tandem with technological advancements—though the whole concept of technology as advancing writing and reading is challenged at regular intervals. The reader is led through the recent history of mechanized and automatic writing technology into the present-day post-truth, AI-driven endless, and instant digital publishing era. Ludovico opens his book with a list of strong, and almost emotional, claims that “a new tactical publishing can reclaim a humanistic approach that allows for fruitful social exchanges, a deeper embrace of our senses, clever publishing strategies, and the discovery and sharing of strategic content archived in libraries” (1). His ultimate goals summarize the book’s topics and simultaneously challenge how we, as readers and producers of content, approach publishing as a social process.
Ludovico guides us through the fascinating realm of scientific and artist books, expanding on what constitutes publications and reading with all our senses, both from the analogue and digital world. His anecdotal storytelling takes us to the living and radiating books in modern history—quite literally, in the case of Marie Curie’s scientific notebooks. His almost sentimental descriptions of the auditory and olfactory experiences in the turning of paper and the smell of old and moldy books provoke a familiar encounter for all of us who have reached for the same old and exciting books on the library shelves.
In transitioning from the physical and sensory interface of reading to the digital, Ludovico observes, we start to miss “the ability to express and perceive nuances of flexible and variable conditions” (34). This sentiment of change, and what it does to us as social and cultural humans in society, carries over into the following chapters on how writing, reading and the perception of truth hinges on “that what seems human”. The writing machines, which have evolved from the imaginable hardware of Llull’ and Swift’ Thinking Machine and Engine to the mechanical experiments like the Eureka and Tape Mark 1, all had the human element as driving and creative “software”. Hand in hand with these writing machines is the evolution of reading machines and devices, exemplified by Fisk’s microfilm reader from the 1920s to the tablet and e-readers, the present-day representation of Douglas Adams’ electronic book.
When Ludovico shows us the move from the early writing machines as hardware and tools for creative artists into the software and AI in present-day publication ecology, we see the pressured economic business model of automatic production on an inhuman industrial scale, where self-writing texts are compared to Orwellian lies and opaqueness.
What may seem a mantra, Ludovico’s exploration into truth describes our time “of deep technical crisis for authorship and truthfulness,” where the familiar concept of Photoshopping seems almost innocent compared to fake news and deepfakes (93). The first part of chapter 3, “Post-truth” –the word, as Ludovico reminds us, became OED’s Word of the Year in 2016, Trump’s election year– is truly the darkest and dystopian description of a world fueled by untruth, post-truth, lies, propaganda, and BigCorp rewriting history in the memory of people.
We are shown the age of constant digital publishing, with loops of endless gratification and constant fear of missing out, in what Ludovico calls the “ecology of attention”, the fast-paced and senseless scrolling on black mirrors. In this age of endless and instant publishing, social media, and “the possibilities of persuasion”, where physical publications are seen as a luxury, the suggested remedy is a “trusted network of people and sources” to humanize how we interact and engage with the world around us (126). In the search for the return to a humanized and cultural space, the luxury of printed publications is presented nearly as a nostalgic and utopian experience.
The pace and sentiment change slightly when Ludovico calls for citizen, activist, and artist librarians—“the information shamans” and “cultural guerrillas”—to be custodians and guides and “help construct and discover paths to reclaim cultural space” as their mission is to “improve society by facilitating the creation of knowledge in their communities” (210). We are presented with a world of living libraries and archives, from the national institutional libraries paving the way for free and available information to all to the artistic and temporal libraries providing a social and cultural space and being a nation’s cultural memory. There is a more uplifting sentiment in this chapter, which starkly contrasts what Ludovico briefly mentions, the enormous cutbacks and closing of public and academic libraries, as they are seen as outdated and redundant in the digital age (169). We get a sense of the main argument that even in this fast-paced and dehumanized digital age, these gathering places of collected and cultural memory are not only custodians of knowledge and champions of free information but also provide a physical space where social reading and relationships can be formed.
There is a joy and excitement in reading how the history of modern-day publication is told in each chapter through the exploration of what has challenged our traditional idea of how text, image, image, sound, and video have been created and made publicly available. While they are fascinating and give a storytelling element to the chapters, the anecdotal structure becomes more of a showcase of curiosities than forwarding a clear argument. They do, however, drive the historical story in a slightly more lighthearted sentiment than what is perceived as the opaqueness of the proposed reality of post-truth. Even with the numerous examples from technological and digital publication history, there is a sense of a wish for a return to the nostalgia of the printed book, the physical library, and the slow time of reading long texts in Tactical Publication. The reader is reminded of similar topics being covered at length in popular books by Alberto Manguel, the former Director of the National Library of Argentina, in his A History of Reading (1996) and The Library at Night (2007). When we read about the endless and instant publishing and scrolling and the ecology of attention, the argument for slowing down and focusing on the luxury of time is echoed in the ever-growing number of books on digital detox, focus time, and slow reading such as Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus – Why you can’t pay attention – and How to Think Deeply Again (2022). These topics are presently highly relevant; several thousand academic studies worldwide have been devoted to how digital media and platforms change our attention and literacy, ranging from students’ in-depth information processing and sustained attention capacity (Delgado, P., & Salmerón, L., 2021), how reading on screen leads to more shallow processing and can hinder reading comprehension (Jensen, R. E., Roe, A., & Blikstad-Balas, M. 2024), and which reading format is better suited for children’s books (Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G., 2021). I often wonder, when looking for a main claim, if the core argument championing the luxury of the physical and sensory printed book could be summarized by Ludovico’s inclusion of Umberto Eco’s statement: “The book is like the spoon, scissor, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved” (36).
Towards the end, the book evolves more and more into a philosophical conversation on the nature and future of writing and publishing. His foretold manifesto is a move towards a truth-driven and object-oriented publishing, slowing the rapid and dehumanized spreading instead of creating content. Already at the outset, we are promised an expanded manifesto on publishing in the twenty-first century, which arrives in the book’s final chapter titled “A new ecology of publishing”. In this final chapter, Ludovico argues almost both for and at times against the rapid technological development; he contends that the digital and analogue still influence and transform each other, but that in this post-digital world, “all media have been reduced to a binary form” (213). At this point, it becomes somewhat difficult to follow which side this manifesto suggests—if sides or directions are correctly understood. The almost oscillating argumentation for and against present-day publishing technology is not always as clear as in his previous chapters.
Similar to his earlier book, Post-Digital Print (2013), in which he concludes: “digital is the paradigm for content and quantity of information; analogue is the paradigm for usability and interfacing…there is no one-way street from analogue to digital; rather, there are transitions between the two, in both directions” (153). In Tactical Publishing, he describes publication not as a unidirectional chain of production, but rather a “network of feedback”, a social event of making ideas public. Ludovico concludes his journey with two pages titled “Toward a Heterotopia of Publishing”, forwarding the more uplifting notion that we “should make our publishing world open but qualified by editing” and with a similar list of hopeful—or perhaps somewhat utopian—propositions for publishers, “caring for audiences; nurturing diversity of sources, content and media” (223). Bringing the physical book back to its opening aim to reclaim a humanistic approach, Ludovico suggests reverse-engineering social media, a push against the endlessness of time- and emotion-stealing platforms filled with “bulimic likes”, and establishing true social, cultural and human relationships.
Tactical Publishing introduces an extensive array of new terminology for studying publication in a post-digital and post-truth era, albeit at times, a tad bit too many are introduced in passing without the necessary clarity and description expected from a scholarly perspective, such as the frequent use of ecology in numerous iterations, but this is easily overlooked in the overall usefulness of the concepts presented.
In addition to being a valuable historical textbook for the development of writing and reading, it is undoubtedly to become indispensable for students and researchers of both analogue and digital culture.
References
Delgado, P., & Salmerón, L. (2021). The inattentive on-screen reading: Reading medium affects attention and reading comprehension under time pressure. Learning and instruction, 71, 101396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2020.101396
Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G. (2021). “A Comparison of Children’s Reading on Paper Versus Screen: A Meta-Analysis”. Review of Educational Research, 91(4), 483-517. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654321998074
Ludovico, A. (2013). Post-digital print: the mutation of publishing since 1894. Onomatopee.
Ludovico, A. (2023). Tactical publishing: using senses, software, and archives in the twenty-first century. The MIT Press.
Manguel, A. (1997). A history of reading. Flamingo.
Manguel, A. (2008). The library at night. Yale University Press.
Jensen, R. E., Roe, A., & Blikstad-Balas, M. (2024). “The smell of paper or the shine of a screen? Students’ reading comprehension, text processing, and attitudes when reading on paper and screen.” Computers & Education, 105107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105107