Coordinators: Dr. David Trefas (David.Trefas@unibas.ch); Dr. Joan Ramon Rodríguez-Amat (mon.rodriguez@gmail.com)

Key words / Paraules clau: ebook, pbook, newspapers, library, university, public sphere, cognitive change

The session:

“There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth and leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers...” (William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” page 207).

It is not only about books. Knowledge is changing in its whole extension. And the institutions where this knowledge was produced, stored, blended and exchanged, too. Libraries, the book and publishing industries, the public periodical paper-based press, the public sphere, the habits of consumption, the forms of reading, or even written language are also in transformation.

This session starts with the assumption of the major theoretical contributions that explained historically the apparition of books as part of the background conditions for the implementation of the modern public sphere. And its purpose is to try to identify as many elements of change as possible. Changes, disperse signs, that relate to the turns in book formats, to the ruptures in the book industry, to the transformation of universities or to the new social roles of libraries. The discussion will be almost a workshop organised along three major fields:

1)      The public sphere and the transformation of the structures of a public extended online. This field includes the new forms of legitimacy, the changes in political engagement and the forms of the participant subject.

2)      Libraries, Universities and institutions of knowledge suffer a major transformation that extends along the forms of science, the educational relationship, and the nature of knowledge.

3)      Changes in the forms of books or newspapers are particular symptoms that contribute to the major transformations taking place.

Inversely to the terrifying and repressing focus traditionally expected in scientific writing (and thinking) this session works in favour of the extensive, lateral, creative and disperse thinking. The coordinators believe that this is the only way to transcend the traditional limits of the disciplinary thought. After all, the new should not be merely thought from the old categories.