Customs build

A book by the late Eric Sloane, a writer and illustrator, shows how a family built everything they needed

There's much too much to read online, but it was hard to resist an article titled "Why E-books Are Banned in My Digital Journalism Class" (Meredith Broussard, New Republic, January 22). It's surprising that one of the tools on which digital journalism is designed to be consumed - the tablet or e-reader - could be banned from this classroom.

Why is it banned? "I was spending an awful lot of class time doing tech support. E-readers were a disruptive technology in the classroom - and not in a good way." She means dying batteries, incompatible versions, pages numbered differently on different devices, and so on. Then: "I know that today's students are supposed to be digital natives, but in my experience, most students are only good at using basic end-user technology."

And then she launches into a paean to the "nearly perfect user interface" that is the codex, the printed book. Apparently the paper book's design so well serves our intuitive (rather than linear) way of thinking that, according to a study she quotes, with a paper book "you have more free capacity for comprehension".

Entertaining, worrying for my profession.

Most people, even those who think of themselves as "digital natives", have no idea how things, like the Internet or their e-readers, work. Thus in some fundamental sense they remain consumers, not creators. There is a consequence of this focus on "user interface": that, because we interact only with finished surfaces (any product from ATM to airliner), the inner workings either grow "confusing" or are simply forgotten.

So technology, the real technology of materials and moving parts, is not fun any more. The magic of the machine - which includes not just what it does but its makers' ingeniousness at drawing maximum efficiency from quite simple starting materials and principles - that chime of inner satisfaction at the harmonisation of intuition and natural law, has evaporated.

If you think this is unimportant, recall how you felt the last time you fixed something at home.

Then see if you can get hold of a book by the late Eric Sloane, a writer and illustrator who loved antique tools and the hand-built lifestyle of the American pioneers. Several are available online and they are not expensive. I picked up Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805 (Wilfred Funk, 1965) at a secondhand bookshop in Bangalore.

This little book grew out of a handwritten diary that Sloane found in an old house. It covers a year in the life of a teenager, "N.B.", whom Sloan names Noah Blake, but describes all the improvements the Blake family made in their homestead between 1790 and 1805.

Timber, leather, stone and iron are the materials from which Noah and his father build everything they need, from bucket to bridge. In beautiful, simple and detailed prose and drawings, Sloane maps the technical imagination and competence of these hardworking people. It is a delight to learn how saws worked, how a log was dressed, a water mill ran, the almanac ruled the calendar.

I mention this book not just as a joy and a corrective to our trap of user interfaces. There is a lacuna in Indians' telling of our own story. How few books and essays there are on old Indian technology, and how unreadable. The historian Irfan Habib has some fine work on this subject, and there is this and that on shipbuilding, and so on. But the telling of technology within daily life - weavers, fishermen, traders, soldiers - with this combination of style and clarity, is an opportunity just waiting to be seized. It is a bit of our imagination, if not our life skills, that urgently needs restocking.

rraote@yahoo.com