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Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for reconceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changes--especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimedia--necessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin. Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain relevant in the digital future.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
10 people are currently reading
215 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
5 books16 followersKathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, where she was Managing Editor of PMLA and other MLA publications. During that time, she also held an appointment as Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming), as well as Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 16,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 25, 2011
There is something ironic about a book that deals with technology and the future of publishing, given that in the view of many the future of publishing does not lie in the book, but then the story of this particular book points to many of the key issues involved in the future of publishing and the academy. It was initially accepted for publication by a press and then turned down on marketing grounds, along with the review and refereeing by the press Fitzpatrick opened it up to an on-line open review and refereeing process (via http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/) (and acknowledges in places where that process resulted in notable changes) and substantial portions of it have been developed through her blog – also Planned Obsolescence - http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/.
The pressures on the academy and academic publishing are considerable – we are, for instance, expected to produce outputs with high impact and achieve a certain number/level of these to qualify for additional funding, which may seem reasonable until we consider, for instance, the fairly short timeframes involved (5-7 years) which mitigates against, for instance, pure research in the sciences where it may be decades before applications are worked through, or many areas in the humanities and social sciences. Alongside these pressures we find commercial publishers shying away from publishing research monographs (as Fitzpatrick discovered) for commercial reasons, while various new media platforms offer us new publishing outlets, while open access journals seem to challenge the place of the print journal, and as Creative Commons publishing licenses chip away at the forces creating privatized ‘intellectual property’.
It is these latter issues – the impacts and effects new media platforms and the like on conventional publishing and ‘the book’ in particular – that Fitzpatrick is concerned with here. The substantive, empirically based, argument turns around four key issues – the character and meaning of authorship, the place and future (forms) of peer reviewing (the process by which we as academics assess whether a piece of work should be published), the character of the text in this new media world, and what it means to and how we go about preserving texts. I’d have to confess, straight up, that the first two issues (peer reviewing and authorship) resonated much more with me than did the questions of texts and preservation mainly because the latter two discussions stretched my technical knowledge beyond its limits, which is not a problem with Fitzpatrick’s writing, accessibility or argument but a problem of my knowledge of the technology I use everyday (and am using now).
So, staying in my comfort zone, she makes a powerful and compelling case in favour of open peer reviews where our research ‘outputs’ grow and develop in public so that we are able to assess and evaluate both the author and the referee. In part I found this compelling because I referee a lot of papers but 1) it is not counted in any assessments of my workload, 2) it is a blind and closed process so even when a paper is published my sometimes considerable contribution is unacknowledged and unknown even by the author as mine although it is a significant part of my scholarly and collegial work, and 3) when done for a commercially published journal it is, in effect, free labour given to a (sometimes) major global publishing conglomerate who can afford to pay! Fitzpatrick’s model opens up the actions of our vocation to collegial oversight and could help develop a (re)new(ed) scholarly community at the very time when commercialising forces are driving into individualising and competitive work.
Equally, she makes a powerful case in favour of a new sense of authorship as contingent, collective and emergent and as about both product and process. In doing so she challenges two current takens-for-granted in scholarly work: the idea of authorial originality (and with it plagiarism and so forth), and the claims to intellectual property that have emerged from the commercialisation of this originality where ironically the one thing that is not legally protected is the idea – only its expression. These claims to intellectual property are a serious threat to scholarship and intellectual practice and mean that, for instance, an undergraduate course that I develop based on my particular set of interests and research which may be unique in my department is legally owned not by me but my university and should I move elsewhere and look to teach the same course I could be subject to legal action to defend my former employer’s intellectual property even though no staff member there is teaching ‘my’ course (I’m not saying my university would do that, just that legally it could). The second implication of Fitzpatrick’s proposed sense of authorship as collective and contingent is that it undermines this intellectual property and could replace it with what she sees as a gift economy – or perhaps even as something residing freely in the commons, given that a ‘gift’ implies reciprocity.
The final chapter shifts away from the empirically grounded character of the rest of the book to become more conjectural and consider the place of the university, publishing and the press in this emerging newly mediated world. Once again the issues are compelling and challenging, being centred on the problem of publishing as a commercial venture. She argues, instead, that the university press could/should be reconceived as a part of the institution’s scholarly apparatus designed to disseminate research of that university. In doing so, she points to places where, for instance, the university press has been restructured as a department (such as a part of a learning and information services unit including the library) and as such has had the profit-making force removed. This chapter is challenging in part because it proposes a profound (and often fundamental) new business model in a context where the evidential base is weak. This is not to denigrate the usefulness of its questions or proposed answers – just to note (as does Fitzpatrick) that it is much more conjectural.
Overall, the book takes us through some of the key questions in contemporary academia and weaves together some of the best of contemporary humanities based scholarship with the problems of current scholarly practice. The character of its propositions are a sign of the profound moment of change we seem to be in, and show clearly that our current thinking – such as open access journals and Creative Commons licenses – are only an important start to a much more significant set of changes that we are going to have to move through rapidly if we are going to not only survive but maintain much of the best of what scholarship and academic work is about.
There is also a review in the Times Higher Education Supplement at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk...
The pressures on the academy and academic publishing are considerable – we are, for instance, expected to produce outputs with high impact and achieve a certain number/level of these to qualify for additional funding, which may seem reasonable until we consider, for instance, the fairly short timeframes involved (5-7 years) which mitigates against, for instance, pure research in the sciences where it may be decades before applications are worked through, or many areas in the humanities and social sciences. Alongside these pressures we find commercial publishers shying away from publishing research monographs (as Fitzpatrick discovered) for commercial reasons, while various new media platforms offer us new publishing outlets, while open access journals seem to challenge the place of the print journal, and as Creative Commons publishing licenses chip away at the forces creating privatized ‘intellectual property’.
It is these latter issues – the impacts and effects new media platforms and the like on conventional publishing and ‘the book’ in particular – that Fitzpatrick is concerned with here. The substantive, empirically based, argument turns around four key issues – the character and meaning of authorship, the place and future (forms) of peer reviewing (the process by which we as academics assess whether a piece of work should be published), the character of the text in this new media world, and what it means to and how we go about preserving texts. I’d have to confess, straight up, that the first two issues (peer reviewing and authorship) resonated much more with me than did the questions of texts and preservation mainly because the latter two discussions stretched my technical knowledge beyond its limits, which is not a problem with Fitzpatrick’s writing, accessibility or argument but a problem of my knowledge of the technology I use everyday (and am using now).
So, staying in my comfort zone, she makes a powerful and compelling case in favour of open peer reviews where our research ‘outputs’ grow and develop in public so that we are able to assess and evaluate both the author and the referee. In part I found this compelling because I referee a lot of papers but 1) it is not counted in any assessments of my workload, 2) it is a blind and closed process so even when a paper is published my sometimes considerable contribution is unacknowledged and unknown even by the author as mine although it is a significant part of my scholarly and collegial work, and 3) when done for a commercially published journal it is, in effect, free labour given to a (sometimes) major global publishing conglomerate who can afford to pay! Fitzpatrick’s model opens up the actions of our vocation to collegial oversight and could help develop a (re)new(ed) scholarly community at the very time when commercialising forces are driving into individualising and competitive work.
Equally, she makes a powerful case in favour of a new sense of authorship as contingent, collective and emergent and as about both product and process. In doing so she challenges two current takens-for-granted in scholarly work: the idea of authorial originality (and with it plagiarism and so forth), and the claims to intellectual property that have emerged from the commercialisation of this originality where ironically the one thing that is not legally protected is the idea – only its expression. These claims to intellectual property are a serious threat to scholarship and intellectual practice and mean that, for instance, an undergraduate course that I develop based on my particular set of interests and research which may be unique in my department is legally owned not by me but my university and should I move elsewhere and look to teach the same course I could be subject to legal action to defend my former employer’s intellectual property even though no staff member there is teaching ‘my’ course (I’m not saying my university would do that, just that legally it could). The second implication of Fitzpatrick’s proposed sense of authorship as collective and contingent is that it undermines this intellectual property and could replace it with what she sees as a gift economy – or perhaps even as something residing freely in the commons, given that a ‘gift’ implies reciprocity.
The final chapter shifts away from the empirically grounded character of the rest of the book to become more conjectural and consider the place of the university, publishing and the press in this emerging newly mediated world. Once again the issues are compelling and challenging, being centred on the problem of publishing as a commercial venture. She argues, instead, that the university press could/should be reconceived as a part of the institution’s scholarly apparatus designed to disseminate research of that university. In doing so, she points to places where, for instance, the university press has been restructured as a department (such as a part of a learning and information services unit including the library) and as such has had the profit-making force removed. This chapter is challenging in part because it proposes a profound (and often fundamental) new business model in a context where the evidential base is weak. This is not to denigrate the usefulness of its questions or proposed answers – just to note (as does Fitzpatrick) that it is much more conjectural.
Overall, the book takes us through some of the key questions in contemporary academia and weaves together some of the best of contemporary humanities based scholarship with the problems of current scholarly practice. The character of its propositions are a sign of the profound moment of change we seem to be in, and show clearly that our current thinking – such as open access journals and Creative Commons licenses – are only an important start to a much more significant set of changes that we are going to have to move through rapidly if we are going to not only survive but maintain much of the best of what scholarship and academic work is about.
There is also a review in the Times Higher Education Supplement at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk...
March 5, 2022
[I wrote this review on March 5, 2012, and posted it to GoodReads on March 5, 2022]
Discussion on the future of books, and scholarly publication in general, has been raging in American universities for several years now. The Institute for the Future of the Book was formed to help channel these efforts [p. 9]. The discussion really has two parts, which pertain to two kinds of academic disciplines: those in which researchers write articles to communicate their findings and to climb the academic ladder, and the ones where scholars are expected to publish books to show their mastery of their fields. Natural sciences and engineering are article disciplines, whereas the humanities are predominantly book disciplines. This book is concerned mostly with the future of publishing in book disciplines, although it does contain references to issues in article disciplines as well.
Compared with popular books or textbooks, academic books have very limited circulations, typically in the hundreds. There are of course exceptions when a book, often the work of an established scholar, makes the transition from academic circles to the popular domain and sells many more copies, but by and large, readers of academic books are other academics who need the information for their own research. This limitation is a source of many of the problems.
An important feature of academic books is that they undergo peer review, a notion that was introduced in the mid-1700s England. Peer review is what creates the “scarcity model” of publishing: each academic press receives many more books and book proposals than it publishes, with peer review being the main basis of selection. This assessment process can be unfair, as many biases and jealousies remain hidden behind the anonymity cloak. By contrast, the Internet, with its practically unlimited publication space, has created the “abundance model,” with a post-publication assessment and rating framework replacing the peer-review pre-publication filter [p. 38].
The current publication model has been built, in part, on financial incentives involving author rights and publisher rights. It is interesting to note that the legal notion of author rights was not conceived until there was a print technology to reproduce large quantities of text, a market system that could accept printed products as objects for sale, and distribution systems to make identical copies available in many places [p. 59]. Before the advent of print technology, authors did not make a distinction between original and copied ideas and “copies” of the same book could be quite different, as commentaries and interpretations were added during the transcription process.
In truth, scholarly publishing does not represent a viable business model. That is why university presses do the bulk of publishing on scholarly topics. These presses are primarily nonprofit organizations that subsidize obscure books on esoteric topics through the occasional popular or even blockbuster book. Unfortunately, university presses have seen funding cuts like all other parts of the academia and are no longer able to sustain their previous modus operandi.
One of the impediments to the acceptance of new publishing technologies is the 600-year history of printed text which makes it necessary to move slowly and to make digital texts, at least in their early version, very similar to printed ones [p. 84]. For example, the notion of “page” is a carryover from the print era and has no natural meaning in digital texts. If digital texts are to be successful, however, they must be designed to offer the most efficient way of the reader and writer relating to each other, rather than as replicas of printed texts in a new format.
According to our current view, a (printed) book is something that is created and read in isolation. The author locks him/herself up in a room in order to focus on writing and the reader is usually alone, at a desk, on the beach, or on a bed, when reading the book. Digital texts, on the other hand, allow book writing and reading to become social activities, with a great deal more interaction between writers and readers [p. 106]. Thus, digital publishing formats must facilitate this interaction. For the most part, however, we seem bent on doing the new digital books in much the same way as print books, rather than dealing with the new on its own terms [p. 195].
Despite the clear benefits of digital publishing, many problems remain to be solved. An important concern in the world of digital books is sustainability. Paper books are resilient. Publishers can fail, libraries can be destroyed or burned (as has been done many times through the human history), and a few copies of each book will survive somewhere. We still do not have full confidence that digital books will survive correspondingly catastrophic events [p. 184].
Changes, though relatively slow, are coming to academic publishing and several experiments look promising. Rice University Press, which had closed in 1996 due to financial difficulties, reopened a decade later as an all-digital press. Another case in point is Philica (http://philica.com), an on-line academic journal that accepts publications on any subject and has set up the requisite mechanisms allowing readers to offer post-publication comments.
The author ends the book thus: “Change is here: we can watch our current publishing system suffocate, leaving the academy not just obsolete but irrelevant, or we can work to create a communication environment that will defy such obsolescence, generating rich scholarly discussions well into the future” [p. 196].
Discussion on the future of books, and scholarly publication in general, has been raging in American universities for several years now. The Institute for the Future of the Book was formed to help channel these efforts [p. 9]. The discussion really has two parts, which pertain to two kinds of academic disciplines: those in which researchers write articles to communicate their findings and to climb the academic ladder, and the ones where scholars are expected to publish books to show their mastery of their fields. Natural sciences and engineering are article disciplines, whereas the humanities are predominantly book disciplines. This book is concerned mostly with the future of publishing in book disciplines, although it does contain references to issues in article disciplines as well.
Compared with popular books or textbooks, academic books have very limited circulations, typically in the hundreds. There are of course exceptions when a book, often the work of an established scholar, makes the transition from academic circles to the popular domain and sells many more copies, but by and large, readers of academic books are other academics who need the information for their own research. This limitation is a source of many of the problems.
An important feature of academic books is that they undergo peer review, a notion that was introduced in the mid-1700s England. Peer review is what creates the “scarcity model” of publishing: each academic press receives many more books and book proposals than it publishes, with peer review being the main basis of selection. This assessment process can be unfair, as many biases and jealousies remain hidden behind the anonymity cloak. By contrast, the Internet, with its practically unlimited publication space, has created the “abundance model,” with a post-publication assessment and rating framework replacing the peer-review pre-publication filter [p. 38].
The current publication model has been built, in part, on financial incentives involving author rights and publisher rights. It is interesting to note that the legal notion of author rights was not conceived until there was a print technology to reproduce large quantities of text, a market system that could accept printed products as objects for sale, and distribution systems to make identical copies available in many places [p. 59]. Before the advent of print technology, authors did not make a distinction between original and copied ideas and “copies” of the same book could be quite different, as commentaries and interpretations were added during the transcription process.
In truth, scholarly publishing does not represent a viable business model. That is why university presses do the bulk of publishing on scholarly topics. These presses are primarily nonprofit organizations that subsidize obscure books on esoteric topics through the occasional popular or even blockbuster book. Unfortunately, university presses have seen funding cuts like all other parts of the academia and are no longer able to sustain their previous modus operandi.
One of the impediments to the acceptance of new publishing technologies is the 600-year history of printed text which makes it necessary to move slowly and to make digital texts, at least in their early version, very similar to printed ones [p. 84]. For example, the notion of “page” is a carryover from the print era and has no natural meaning in digital texts. If digital texts are to be successful, however, they must be designed to offer the most efficient way of the reader and writer relating to each other, rather than as replicas of printed texts in a new format.
According to our current view, a (printed) book is something that is created and read in isolation. The author locks him/herself up in a room in order to focus on writing and the reader is usually alone, at a desk, on the beach, or on a bed, when reading the book. Digital texts, on the other hand, allow book writing and reading to become social activities, with a great deal more interaction between writers and readers [p. 106]. Thus, digital publishing formats must facilitate this interaction. For the most part, however, we seem bent on doing the new digital books in much the same way as print books, rather than dealing with the new on its own terms [p. 195].
Despite the clear benefits of digital publishing, many problems remain to be solved. An important concern in the world of digital books is sustainability. Paper books are resilient. Publishers can fail, libraries can be destroyed or burned (as has been done many times through the human history), and a few copies of each book will survive somewhere. We still do not have full confidence that digital books will survive correspondingly catastrophic events [p. 184].
Changes, though relatively slow, are coming to academic publishing and several experiments look promising. Rice University Press, which had closed in 1996 due to financial difficulties, reopened a decade later as an all-digital press. Another case in point is Philica (http://philica.com), an on-line academic journal that accepts publications on any subject and has set up the requisite mechanisms allowing readers to offer post-publication comments.
The author ends the book thus: “Change is here: we can watch our current publishing system suffocate, leaving the academy not just obsolete but irrelevant, or we can work to create a communication environment that will defy such obsolescence, generating rich scholarly discussions well into the future” [p. 196].
February 24, 2025
While this book focuses on the publishing industry and is now about 13 years old it was a really digestible read and most is still applicable. Very interesting to see the prescience and planning in these industry level changes. Would like something more robust and more recent but this is a good starting place.
September 15, 2018
Well, now I know why everyone keeps going on about Digital Humanities. This was a very interesting read.
Read
June 11, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2012/11/14/r...
Review by Blake Seidenshaw
In a speech given at the University of Illinois in 1962, the American architect and polymath R. Buckminster Fuller spelled out an eerily-prescient vision of the technological innovations which were bound to revolutionize education, precipitating the birth of a ‘world-around’ society. “Simultaneous curricula are obsolete”, he proclaimed,
“Real education […] will be something to which individuals will discipline themselves spontaneously under the influence of their own […] individually unique chromosomal pattern. Everyone has his own chromosomal pattern. No two persons have the same appetite at the same time. There is no reason why they should.”
Under the conditions of electronic media, our dysfunctional educational practices would be revitalized and reoriented to the needs of individual learners. Fuller imagines a complex system of ‘directly-beamed’ two-way television signals, whereby each home would communicate with a central library of videos; obviously the architecture of what we now call the web ended up taking a slightly different form. But the imperative that it has seemed to embody for the past couple of decades of its startlingly-rapid proliferation surely retains some of the flavor of Bucky’s prognostications: “We must make all of the information immediately available…”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/11/14/r...
Review by Blake Seidenshaw
In a speech given at the University of Illinois in 1962, the American architect and polymath R. Buckminster Fuller spelled out an eerily-prescient vision of the technological innovations which were bound to revolutionize education, precipitating the birth of a ‘world-around’ society. “Simultaneous curricula are obsolete”, he proclaimed,
“Real education […] will be something to which individuals will discipline themselves spontaneously under the influence of their own […] individually unique chromosomal pattern. Everyone has his own chromosomal pattern. No two persons have the same appetite at the same time. There is no reason why they should.”
Under the conditions of electronic media, our dysfunctional educational practices would be revitalized and reoriented to the needs of individual learners. Fuller imagines a complex system of ‘directly-beamed’ two-way television signals, whereby each home would communicate with a central library of videos; obviously the architecture of what we now call the web ended up taking a slightly different form. But the imperative that it has seemed to embody for the past couple of decades of its startlingly-rapid proliferation surely retains some of the flavor of Bucky’s prognostications: “We must make all of the information immediately available…”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/11/14/r...
November 2, 2014
Fitzpatrick's account of the new modes and changes in scholarly communication remains remarkably timely in 2014. The book is well documented, detailed and sophisticated, avoiding the problems of technological determinism and futurology that undermine other accounts.
The only speculative leap in her analysis is her admittedly utopian reliance on the idea of an economy of the gift, which she argues should shape the collaboration of scholars in the digital humanities, at least in the early chapters of the book. The final chapter ("The University") provides a more realistic assessment of the costs.
It seems more accurate and pragmatic, to this reader at least, to say that the academy is currently operating under politically imposed neoliberal austerity. There is no economy of abundance, and that, as well as the need for a broad range of skill sets and expensive infrastructure, makes collaboration in the digital humanities all the more necessary.
The only speculative leap in her analysis is her admittedly utopian reliance on the idea of an economy of the gift, which she argues should shape the collaboration of scholars in the digital humanities, at least in the early chapters of the book. The final chapter ("The University") provides a more realistic assessment of the costs.
It seems more accurate and pragmatic, to this reader at least, to say that the academy is currently operating under politically imposed neoliberal austerity. There is no economy of abundance, and that, as well as the need for a broad range of skill sets and expensive infrastructure, makes collaboration in the digital humanities all the more necessary.
December 29, 2014
This is an accessible look at the current state of digital humanities. Fitzpatrick really delves deep into the economic realities of publishing scholarly online work online and how in many ways it can be beneficial (more collaborative) but is also wary of the costs as well (less editorial control/ vetting) Overall, an engaging treatment of the subject. It would be perfect for an undergrad or grad course.
April 1, 2014
An unusually eloquent discussion of the future of academic writing in a digital age.Fitzpatrick argues that it is not so much changes in technology as the inability of our institutions to respond to those changes that make intellectual writing an increasingly marginal activity. Read for my grad course on Writing in a Digital Age.
August 19, 2017
A very interesting and perhaps idealistic look at academic publishing now and in the future, especially as to how technology should be changing processes and evaluations. She brings up some important but potentially revolutionary ideas about tenure, publishing, reviewing, and collaboration, and I would love to see many of those implemented. I'm not holding my breath, though I do think that certain institutions and organizations are trying to push beyond their institutional stasis to try to change things.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews