Christine D. Baker

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (2023) by Jeff Jarvis. History; Historiography; Printing; Language; Social Media; Media.
• The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2024) by Christopher L. Hayes. Social Media; Media.

Reading these two books at the same time was a bit of a gut punch. Together, you get a very large overview of where we’ve come from with the ‘attention economy’ beginning with the changes caused by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press all the way through to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in order to force the world to pay attention to him.

Jarvis’ The Gutenberg Parenthesis does a deep dive into the ‘history of the book’, looking in detail at what we know of Johannes Gutenberg and the complexity of his invention. I found the argument of his book fascinating. He’s looking at a concept called ‘The Gutenberg Parenthesis’, formulated by L.O. Sauerberg, which looks at the nature of communication before, during, and after the invention of the printing press. Basically, it argues that printing ushered in a new form of communication. Published books came to dominate the oral culture that had preceded them. However, digital culture–which allows us to communicate without the mediation of printers and publishers–is returning us to a world that it much closer to oral culture. The “Gutenberg Parenthesis” is the period when print dominated, bracketed by different forms of oral/digital culture on either side.

Part of what Jarvis is arguing is that it took literal centuries for all of the changes wrought by the printing press to shake out. Things like the development of ‘novels’; publishing; genres; indexes; tables of contents: these were all things that came out of the creation of printing but took time. While television and radio also changed how we exchange ideas, Jarvis argues that it’s too soon for us to know all of the changes that the internet will cause to our society. While we may feel like we’re at a low point in Internet culture, we still haven’t even dreamed of the different forms that internet-based communication may take in the future.

For me, Chris Hayes’ book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, made an interesting (but alarming) continuation of Jarvis’ argument. Hayes is arguing that attention is now a commodity sought by, well, everyone: other individuals, companies, governments, social/political movements. He looks at two kinds of attention: voluntary or compelled. Voluntary attention is when we’re paying attention to something we choose to focus on. Compelled attention tends to be the kind of thing that will involuntarily draw your attention away from something that you’re choosing to focus on: a large bang; the sound of a tray of glasses breaking in a restaurant; your kid crying.

Hayes is arguing that the tech companies have kind of weaponized this compelled attention. You’re trying to pay attention to something, but you keep getting pulled out of it by notifications. Companies are, basically, optimizing to keep drawing our attention involuntarily over and over. And we’re getting worse at holding sustained voluntary attention because of it. If you think about something like Facebook, Instagram, or X, it’s basically a dopamine slot machine: every post that rolls past your screen is–to an extent–grabbing your attention anew.

There’s also a part of his book where he’s talking about the attention of strangers; the new nature of ‘fame’ or ‘being seen’ in the age of the internet. As he put it in an interview for The Atlantic, “what we’ve done is basically democratize the madness-inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society. Every teenager with a phone now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.” Compiments tend to wash over you, but the insult and negativity sticks.

He argues that our attention is finite and valuable. And that the commodification of our attention is alienating us. Social media has gotten too good at grabbing our attention and, for a lot of interactions where we’re not getting the attention, recognition, and depth that communication used to get us. This leaves us feeling alienated, especially since the algorithms of much of our social media select for negative attention and some of our brains don’t necessarily know how to tell the difference between ‘any attention’ and ‘negative attention’.

As a historian, I like thinking about how the changes we’re seeing now, with the rise of the internet, parallels the kinds of changes caused by the introduction of radio/newspapers/telegrams, which maybe parallels the kinds of changes caused by the introduction of printing overall. Both of these books draw our attention (ha!) to the idea that we have been here before and we’ve figured out these conundrums, but it wasn’t an easy path. (It’s been argued that the invention of printing feuled the relgious wars of the early modern era and perhaps the invention of radio/newspaper/telegraphs played a role in the rise of fascism of the early 20th century).

Both books try to offer some thoughts on solutions and what could come next, but it’s difficult to see past our current situation. I have been thinking more about what I focus my own attention on in the past few months. Starting to write here is a part of that: I want to focus more on the developed ideas that I find in books. I still like news, social media, and podcasts, but it can often feel very ephemeral to me: focused on current outrages. (Some of this is a product of the types of news, social media, and podcasts that I am into.) But I’m trying to be a bit more deliberate in my choices.

I decided to read this book because I am always looking for more historical information about peoples who lived in the mountainous areas ‘between’ empires. (I just find it interesting to think about the peoples who avoided getting swept up into the larger historical states of their eras). I picked this up, in part, because it was available on audiobook.

Ed Douglas is a journalist and a mountain climber. The latter is the basis of his interest in the history of the Himalayas.

I am generally happy to read history books by journalists. They’re written in a different style than books written by a PhD historian, even ones where the historian is trying to write for a popular audience.

But Team, this one definitely irritated me from the start. It did get better over the course of the book. And I am *very sympathetic* to the fact that writing books is HARD WORK and I want to celebrate authors who do that, regardless of what field they come from. But he began his book with the question of “why have historians never studied ALL of the Himalayas?” and never bothered to honestly look for the answer to that question (which is, at least in part, linked with the nature of the types of sources available and the language learning required to read them). He also began with the very tired trope of the people of the Himalayas seeming to be “beyond history.” Ugh.

His accounts of ancient Himalaya history was extremely thin, padded by extensive discussions of journalists and mountain climbers he’d met in the region. I was further frustrated that, for the most part, he was led by the nose through his narrative by the British sources that he had for the post-colonial period. I suspect that this is because most of the secondary literature that he read was actually histories of British India. But it’s a bit rich to start by saying that there are no real histories of all the Himalayas and have most of the book you write focus mostly on the imperial forces of the region.

This book is kind of a weird mishmash of a memoir (here’s an interesting dude I met while I was in Nepal!) + anecdotes from recent colonial history of the region. It’s 600 pages where, for my taste, far too much of it was either about the author talking about his own experiences in the region OR talking in great detail about British people in the region.

I DID like some of the chapters on very recent history. As a journalist, this is really where the book did shine. He also did a great job, unsurprisingly, when talking about the history of mountain climbers (including the Sherpas and the issues affecting them)! But I just really wanted him to foreground more about the people of the Himalayas.

I think I decided to read Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (pub 2024) after Hank Green recommended it in one of his videos in late December. I can see why Green was interested in it, considering his own work online.

DiResta has a background in Computer Science and Political Science and is currently a research prof at Georgetown’s School of Public Policy, but I can’t actually find info about what field her PhD is in. (Does she have a PhD? Can you become an “Associate research professor” at Georgetown without one?) But her background is in misinformation research and, for awhile, she was the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which focused on how social media can be used to spread disinformation, misinformation, and abuse, generally.

Her book investigates how social media amplifies certain kinds of narratives by influences that DiResta calls “invisible rulers,” a term she borrows from a 1928 book Propaganda by Edward Bernays. Bernays pioneered the field of corporate public relations and argued how these ‘invisible rulers’ in society shaped public opinion.

Her main argument, which is more of a statement of fact, is that our present form of social media has shattered consensus-based reality and that we can now live in niche realities tailored to our own beliefs. Using her own personal experience plus her background at the Stanford Internet Observatory, she discusses how the most common algorithms reward rage bait and how the likelihood of harassment by social media mobs stifles debate and increases polarization. She is not the first to say these things, but I found her analysis interesting (and depressing).

Towards the end of the book, she offers some thoughts on ways we might eventually get out of this morass. (I appreciated that she did acknowledge that we’ve been here before; new mass comms tech often leads to social freakouts.) Mainly, she argued that we need to acknowledge that ATTENTION (not information) is currently our scarce resource and we need to use platforms that allow us to decide how we spend ours.

I include a lot about early writing systems in my ancient world history class and I’ve learned what I teach in a fairly piecemeal fashion. So, at some point over winter break, I decided to look for a more systematic introduction on writing. I cannot remember if someone specifically recommended this book or if I picked it because it was available from the library and the author sounded authoritative. [Fischer is the former director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in New Zealand (although he was probably still the director when this book was published; I suspect he’s retired now).]

Team. I loved this book. It’s from 2001, so there may be things in it that are outdated. And a skim of the goodreads reviews tells me that a lot of people found it overly dry and encyclopedic. But I found it absolutely fascinating. I literally read it in one sitting, staying up WAY past my bedtime to finish it. (And I literally took six single-spaced pages of notes on this book while I was reading it — and I didn’t even take notes on the parts that aren’t relevant to my teaching.)

I was impressed that the book didn’t try to argue some kind of progressive view of language or anything about how language = civilization. He’s very explicit that he is NOT arguing that. In the introduction, he notes: “Writing is not an automatic reward social sophistication. Writing must be elaborated, and this entails a protracted process determined by evolving social needs.”

I’d be very interested to hear how the field has developed/critiqued his arguments over the past 25 years. I have also discovered that he published this as part of a ‘trilogy’ of sorts, with A History of Reading and A History of Language.

Update: I have learned that he put out a revised version in 2021. I’ve ordered it!

This is the first book in the Tyrant Philosophers series. I wrote quite a bit about this series in my 2024 fiction roundup.

If you’re not familiar: the book introduces you to Ilmar, a city under occupation by the Palleseen and ready to revolt. The city sits on the edge of the Anchorwood, a dark forest filled with monsters, death, and magic. The story centres on a wide cast of characters including Yasnic, the last priest of an unappreciated small god; Lemya, a student aching to help spark a revolution; Ruslav, a thug who…has to redefine himself; Blackmane, a foreign magician who is now a relic reseller; Langrice, the keeper of the Anchorage, which is a bar that sits at the junction of the Anchorwood and the town. There are more characters, but these are some of my favorites. (Tchaikovsky kindly provides a Dramatis Personae at the start of the book which I absolutely find myself referring to.)

This is a reread for me. I finished the third book in the series, Days of Shattered Faith (2024), in late December and immediately began rereading the series (and, yes, I am already working on book 2).

I have not traditionally been a rereader of fiction. It’s really something that I started doing during the pandemic, when I wanted to revisit comfortable worlds where I mostly knew (depending on my memory) what was going to happen. I reread a lot of science fiction in 2019 and 2020, with my favourite being John Scalzi’s works. I reread so much Scalzi that I took to referring to the practice as “comfort Scalzi.”

That rereading practice also helped me see the value of rereading. With a really good book, a well constructed world, you see more on the second read through. And this is what I am finding with Tchaikovsky’s series here. He drops you right into the midst of a new world without a ton of exposition, trusting that you’ll figure things out in time. And you do! But rereading allows you to return to the beginning of the story with all that knowledge that you gleaned from before.

This is perhaps a long way of saying that I am really enjoying the reread. I am noticing and appreciating so much more.

Just finished Adeeb Khalid’s Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (2021). Khalid is a history professor at Carleton College and he’s won a fair number of awards for his research and teaching, including several NEH Fellowships. This book is his fourth.

As the subtitle indicates, this book covers from about the 1700s to the present (with a bit on Central Asian identities earlier). I’m a medievalist who teaches ancient history, so I do wish he’d covered more of the pre-modern history, but that’s not what he set out to do and that’s fair.

I read this book because I don’t know a lot about contemporary Central Asia. I include aspects of its ancient and medieval past when I teach world history, but I wanted to understand more about where this region had ‘ended up’. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of how Iran has tended to get ‘caught’ between the Russians and the British in 19th and 20th century history (pre-1979). Central Asia tends to get caught between the Russians and the Chinese.

For me, what this book did best was discuss the ways that Central Asia has been pushed and pulled by Russia and China (in whatever manifestations those two states happened to be in at the time). He does a great job of talking about the Sovietization of the different Central Asian nations, including how it was often an awkward fit. (Communists kept trying to figure out who the bourgeois would be in a largely nomadic society, to awkward results.) I also really enjoyed his discussion of the creation of different types of Central Asian identities (such as Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, etc) and how those identities have developed over time. He also spends a fair amount of space discussing Xinjiang and its traumatic relationship with China.

I listened to this as an audiobook, which I would say is NOT an ideal way to consume this book. There’s a lot of detail that you’re going to miss (and I did, I’m sure). But I still feel like I know a lot more about modern Central Asia now than when I started, so I’ll call that a win. There was a PDF that accompanied the book, but I didn’t open it. I did find myself periodically googling maps of the region, but my knowledge of the geography of Central Asia was already passable. You might want to have a map open/ready when you read it — it’ll help.

My most-read genres tend to be science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. In general, I consider myself more of a scifi reader than fantasy, but, looking back, I read a lot of fantasy that I loved.

I started and ended 2024 with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers series. I have trouble articulating what it is about this world that I love–it’s gritty, violent, and filled with monsters (human and otherwise)–but it’s also has a cast of characters just trying to make their way and do their best in their problematic world. I love it. I read the first book in the series, City of Last Chances (2022), early in 2024, then its sequel, House of Open Wounds (2023). In December, the third book in the world came out: Days of Shattered Faith (2024). I finished it towards the end of December and immediately started rereading the series.

Tchaikovsky is a well-known author. He’s won a lot of awards and he is incredibly prolific (I think he had 4 new books come out in 2024). He’s pretty much on my ‘must read’ list. His Children of Time (2015) series is outstanding and brings in a lot of his background in zoology. I also love his Final Architecture series, which begins with Shards of Earth (2021). The man is also a genius at naming things. His character names often literally get stuck in my head, where I spend time rolling around with them just to appreciate them. (My favourite is the Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook, from the Final Architecture.)

Tchaikovsky has…uh, at least 2 novels and 2 novellas scheduled for next year. I’m looking forward to them all. He posts about his writing on his website.

John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024) was also a favourite from this year. It’s a queer, ace romance between a monster and a monster-hunter. It surprised me, to be honest. I thought it would be fun, but it manages to be heartwarming without being overly saccharine. I am often wary of some of the dynamics of romance (I hate a plotline that could be solved by the main characters just communicating), but Wiswell avoids those pitfalls or plays with the tropes in ways that do not make me cringe. This is Wiswell’s first published book (although he’s published short stories!) and I’m looking forward to what comes next, a retelling of the Hercules narrative called Wearing the Lion (June 2025).

Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller (2023) and Sunbringer (2024) were also unexpected delights. It’s a fairly epic fantasy set in a world where gods are forbidden and those who worship them must do so in secret. It follows three main characters: a godkiller seeking revenge; a young noble woman who is bonded with a god; and a former knight on a quest.

I wish I could remember how they got on my ‘to read’ list (I read too many newsletters about new scifi and fantasy!), but I was immediately absorbed. I am looking forward to the third (and final?) book in the series, coming out in April this year: Faithbreaker.

History:

• Amanda H. Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (2022). Podany is an Emeritus History Prof from Cal State Polytechnic. This is an incredible book. I have read it twice and recommended it to so many people. My non-historian partner also enjoyed it. She does an absolutely incredible job of bringing alive the history of ancient Mesopotamia. You will learn about Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. You will come to appreciate how people were able to build cities and communicate before the development of writing (ca. 3400 BCE, invented by the Sumerians) but you will also learn the stories of ancient craftspeople and traders.
• Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023). Harris is a journalist, but this is an epic history book. It looks at the history of Palo Alto, and explores how Stanford shaped the town and, in turn, how Stanford’s research agenda has shaped capitalism, in part due to its ability to work with the US government and get large grants. It’s a brick of a book (720 pages), but I think it’s worth it. I really enjoy it when writers can use a focused history (like of a town) and show how that small thing has affected broader history.
• Robert A Caro’s The Power Broker (1974). I finally read it this year, so I am required to recommend it. I don’t make the rules; if you finish this book, you are automatically inducted into the Cult of Caro. I was already a member because I have also read Caro’s multivolume (and, as yet, unfinished) biography of LBJ. But, honestly, this is better. He just really does an amazing job talking about the effects that one man had on New York and on urban planning overall. I definitely recommend pairing it with the 99% Invisible Breakdown.
• Paul Pettit’s Homo Sapiens Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution Rewriting Our Origins (2023). Pettit is an Archaeology Prof at Durham University. What I mainly appreciated about this book is it’s focus on HOW we know what we know about early homo sapiens. There’s a lot of complex science involved in learning about history from 10s of 1000s of years ago. Pettit does a lovely job of explaining it.
• Matt Gabriele and David Perry’s Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe (2024). This book just came out and it’s fantastic. It’s a fun (but sometimes grim and violent) tale of late 8th and early 9th century European history. They do an excellent job of telling the story of the Franks as well as talking about HOW historical narratives are crafted and their power.

Other Non-Fiction:

• Ed Conway’s Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization (2023). Conway is a journalist who focuses on economics and that shows in his selection of his six raw materials (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium). But he does an amazing job of talking about where these resources come from, the price of extraction, and what they’re used for. You’ll learn a lot and also maybe be inspired to try to visit sand mines (that might just be me and my partner).
• Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023). Parking is a scrouge. Grabar is a journalist who writes about housing, transportation, and urban policy at Slate. Read this book to get mad about how much money, energy, and space we give to parking (and cars) and how it makes our world and our lives demonstrably worse.
• Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places (2024). Brown is a lawyer and science fiction writer in Austin. His book is part memoir, detailing his own journey of building a house in the ‘edgelands’ of Austin, between industrial wastelands and urban wildlife. But it’s also a well-written rumination on how we live in our world and think about the environment in late-stage capitalism. It will change how you think about the land and life around you.
• Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food (2023). Warning: this book will make you hungry. Dunlop is a well-known chef who has dedicated her life to eating and making Chinese food. This book does an amazing job capturing the complexity and diversity of Chinese cooking and explaining it specifically to a non-Chinese audience (although it can be equally enjoyed by Chinese people and people of Chinese heritage!). She will also teach you a lot about food in general.

I’ve been working to get my news from more independent sources and I subscribe to several news newsletters that deliver excellent reporting right to my inbox. So, this morning, I got an email from The Tyee, a local Vancouver independent online news magazine, that contained the headline “COVID-19 Turns Five Today. The Next Pandemic Is Lurking.”

Oof. I feel like my sense of time has been permanently altered by the pandemic. My life since Covid is so different from my life before (mostly in good ways!). It’s just hard to contemplate that it’s been five years. (And I am deliberately ignoring the bit about bird flu.)

Before I moved to Vancouver, I mostly taught Middle Eastern history from about 600 CE to the present. I always tried to bring in the larger Mediterranean and Asian contexts; I felt like my teaching was fairly broad. But now I’ve been teaching an ancient world survey for about 3 years where we go from hominids to about 500 CE in the Mediterranean, Middle East, India, and China. Coming from a medievalist’s perspective, I’ve enjoyed exploring more of the ancient world!

The students who take my ancient world survey are not history majors. They are lovely to teach in many ways, but I do miss teaching history majors. Specifically, I miss teaching students who wanted to become high school history teachers. They were often the most curious about the past, how we construct it, and the ways that they’d be a part of that process in the future.

So, looking to 2025, I am looking to find more ways to connect with more people to talk more about history. I’ve been beginning some history projects in the last year (mainly working on local history) and I want to do more of that. I am also at the very early stages of planning a pop history podcast with a local journalist and history appreciator Warren Frey.

I’ve also decided to try to talk more about my reading. I read…a lot. Usually close to 150 books per year, mostly focused on science fiction and history. I love hearing about the books that other people have enjoyed and I want to become a larger part of that conversation. I’ll be posting about that here.

These aren’t resolutions, just stating some intentions. Happy 2025 to all! May it be calm and filled with the things you’re wishing for.

As I was finishing up my last semester at IUP in December 2021, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do next. In October, I had made it to the first interview for a local tenure-track job, but hadn’t heard anything back (still haven’t). Serendipitously, a local school, Coquitlam College, that focuses on teaching international students, put up a job post in mid-December looking for someone to teach their history of the ancient world. I sent the department chair an email and my CV. They were just about to close for winter break and needed someone to be ready to teach starting on January 5th.

While I have taught the medieval survey in various forms over the years, I had not ever done an ancient world survey. I spent winter break prepping as I finished up a few things from IUP. Prepping a new class always feels like I am a computer uploading as much history into my head as I can (and then processing it into lectures and slides!) and it was fun to learn so much about the ancient world!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing since January. I have two in-person sections on Mondays and Wednesdays and I teach an online section on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’ve also be doing some grantwriting, copyediting, and copywriting on the side. My Coquitlam colleagues are really nice and the students have been great, but I am excited about finishing up the semester (one more week, then finals!) and focusing on my freelance business for the summer.

While there are no guarantees, it sounds like Coquitlam would like to have me back for the Fall. They are a private two-year school and don’t operate like most of the colleges that I know of — they don’t do any kind of tenure system, just short term contracts for specific classes, although most of my colleagues have been teaching there for about ten years or more. Their ‘full time’ is 4 classes each semester in Fall, Spring, and Summer. I am not interested in teaching full time or over the summer, but I am hoping that I can teach a couple classes with them each Fall and Spring. I want to use the non-teaching time to focus on the new freelance business.

My new business has a name, but not yet an official published website. I am calling it Klaxon Communications, because really enjoy the ‘Aaaa-ooooooooo-ga’ noise of the traditional klaxon; it just felt like it fit. (One could say that I can be a human klaxon myself.) I’ve been doing a bit of work here and there, but haven’t actually had the time to get the official website finished and posted. It should be up by the end of April.