Why u hatin internet?
In the realm of opinion, there is truly nothing like a Really Big Idea. Observe Maureen Dowd soft-tossing grenade after grenade in the pages of the New York Times ("Men: Are They Even Suitable for Breeding?"), or Sasha Frere-Jones suggesting that indie rock is not sufficiently "miscegenated" in the New Yorker, or, hell, George Kennan anonymously suggesting a policy of containment towards the Soviets in the pages of Foreign Affairs sixty years ago. As you can see, the "bigness" of the Really Big Idea is relative to the arena to which it is relevant; the only necessary component is the idea's audaciousness. It doesn't have to be correct, or even well considered - in fact, if you really want to set tongues a-wagging, it's probably best that their be a few gaps in your reasoning. The Really Big Idea is about the controversy it subsequently engenders: how could person X (the more credibility in his/her field person X has, the better) say Really Big Idea in forum Y (the more widely-respected the forum the better, especially if it has a relatively conservative reputation when it comes to voicing Really Big Ideas)? The intended effect is to create a scene comparable to that at the Paris premier of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps.This week, the editors of The New Republic have seen fit to lead-off with an editorial portentously titled "The Battle of the Book." The premise is essentially thus: the digital age is killing off the book. This consequence, according to the author, is not necessarily unintended. This is not to say that anyone is disparaging the book on grounds of content; rather it is the physical format - binding, glue, pages, ink, etc. - that vexes. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is quoted calling print "the last bastion of analog"; his company (which it should be noted began as a book e-tailer) has introduced a device called the Kindle, which would allow people to download digitized copies of books and other print media instantaneously via a wireless internet connection. This has been done, according to TNR, under the guise of saving "the book from the print."
More ominously is the way that our digital, multi-platform lifestyle is weaning us away from "long form" media - an Orwellian term taken to mean, well, books - and towards less time consuming and intellectually demanding distractions, such as YouTube clips, or mp3s, or blogs (HEY THANKS FOR READING!). Obviously, the Internet et al. did not initiate this process: I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with "veletision." However, it is a great leap forward from the days of three channels and rabbit ears to the plethora of personal media devices and unlimited access to untold amounts of content that most of us enjoy now. Previous to the digital revolution, the book as a physical form had largely been unchanged and unchallenged since the days of Guttenberg. Now to sit down with a book is to yank ourselves away from The Device You Are Now Looking At - a device which is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from just about every other source of media delivery there is. The truly committed can watch TV and movies, listen to music, read everything from the news to recipes for canapes to whacked out conspiracy theories about the "Amero", interface with friends via text, and, thanks to VoIP, even make phone calls. And hell, that's just via the computer. Insert "have you heard about this crazy iPhone gadget?" joke here.
Now, no one is suggesting that books are inconvenient: they're still entirely self-contained, highly portable, require no electricity to operate, and though they take up space, all but the most committed bibliophiles seem to have enough room for those they own. However, the widespread belief is that in the 21st century, print is a prison, a medium consigned to obsolescence; divorcing the book from print and ending its holdout status in the digital age is therefore considered essential to keeping the form, and the ideas therein, relevant. Yes, people will continue to read, but reading, the ability to understand the printed word, it seems, does not necessarily equate to literacy - comprehending information on an analytical level. While this is not to say that the internet is devoid of intellectually stimulating content (AGAIN, THANKS FOR READING!), some ideas require a book-length unpacking; if books remain largely in the realm of "analog", the fear is that people will never encounter an idea pursued for more than a few thousand words. And that's just non-fiction: while the internet has proven fertile ground for authors and devotees of (often pornographic) Harry Potter fan fiction, people aren't typically devouring Charles Dickens or Toni Morrison or, hell, actual J.K. Rowling on their flat-screens and laptops.
The TNR, though, has read its Marshall McLuhan. Referring to a Newsweek reporter's claim, in the same story as the aforementioned Bezos quotes, to be "reading Boswell's Life of Johnson on his iPhone", the editorial's author issues a decisive dismissal:
No, he isn't. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms. Bleak House is not e-mail (even if it once was serialized) and Atonement does not deliver information. "Search" is not the most exciting demand that one can make of a text. So let us see how many conversions to literacy's pleasures these gadgets make, and let us be grateful for them; but let us also recognize that we toy with the obsolescence of the book at our mental peril.Or, phrased another way, "the medium is the message." It's an interesting point. Are books simply the words on the page, or does the form of the conveyance matter? No one doubts that the Internet has altered writing, in terms of democratizing the process of getting work to an audience, creating an entirely new form in the blog, and enabling the use of hyperlinks to instantaneously explain concepts and connect readers with related materials. These are radical innovations to be sure, but they are also specific to web-based writing, for reasons both stylistic and technical. But does a simple change of context alter our perception of work, otherwise unchanged from print form, so greatly as to dramatically change the way we consume and understand it?
The Internet certainly has degraded the concept of "authority" in writing. When you read something in print, you could be absolutely certain that somebody cared enough about the ideas expressed - and their manner of expression - that considerable resources had been expended to get said ideas before your eyes. This is obviously not to say that books and other print materials aren't qualitatively different: that's besides the point. The fact is that though I initially read "The Battle of the Book" in a print edition of The New Republic, I have linked to a perfectly free copy of precisely the same article above. Now, platform-wise, the editors of the TNR and I are on the same playing field: my content is the same price as theirs, and just as accessible by anyone with an internet connection. However, there is a significant difference between reading "The Battle of the Book" as a page one editorial in print - a position imbuing the piece with a manifesto quality - and reading it on the website, where a link to it is presently buried half way down the front page in a side bar, with not even a synopsis to convey its import.
Imagine if Marx and Engels had first published the Communist Manifesto on a blog: certainly it would have been immediately accessible to a global audience, but would anybody have bothered to read it? Would it have changed history? What about Tom Paine's Common Sense, or Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique? These are revolutionary ideas that altered humanity's collective consciousness for better or for worse, but would we be able to identify them today? Even if they were on a web page right in front of our faces? (HI DERE!)
Let us remember, however, that we are not merely talking about eliminating the printed word from future existence, but taking works published in the past and recreating them whole on the web: we already know about The Communist Manifesto, and Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, too, for that matter. Clearly, their cultural currency is well-established. Yet, even has canonical as those masterworks are, is there not the possibility that their meaning could be altered and their significance diminished by digitization?
It is an issue of associations. Take, for instance, the YouTube presidential debates: the selection of the leader of the free world has now been linked with a website considered by most of us to be a repository for time-wasting, low-content comedic diversions - think Dramatic Chipmunk and Angry German Kid. (On second though, perhaps Angry German Kid and Rudolph Giuliani are already associated in the public's mind.) Certainly, such a move can be seen as a democratizing innovation. Yet it is important to remember that democratization not only means equal access to opportunity, but the democratization of authority - a democratization that does not typically reward those among us deserving of it, but instead lowers the bar and muddies the waters. Consider the rise of intelligent design, a thoroughly ridiculous attempt* to lend scientific credibility to fundamentalist religious beliefs. Suddenly, evolution, a logical theoretical concept vetted by a century and half's worth of rigorous scientific inquiry has come under attack by people whose rebuttal principally consists of an assertion that nature is simply too complex to have developed without the input of an "intelligent designer" (i.e. God). That this is the intellectual equivalent of saying "well, there has to be an easier way, so obviously you're wrong" has not deterred the media and high ranking members of the United States government from embracing this so-called "controversy."
Yes, this position smacks of intellectual elitism. However, I'm not saying that I embrace the idea of choking off the access to outlets of expression the digital age has afforded us, nor am I even saying that I concur with The New Republic's reasoning as to the qualitative differences between print and digital. Yet I do think it more likely that Naked Lunch and Gravity's Rainbow will get pushed down into the muck, obscured by, well, what you're reading now, than they are to be improved by digitization. I don't subscribe to the "dumbing down" school of popular culture, but I do believe that we are living in a highly fragmented society, wherein the Internet has improved out ability to self-select, allowing us to hone in on like-minded individuals and intensely focus on narrow, preexisting interests to the exclusion of novel ideas and experiences. Obviously the Internet has given us access to a greater breadth information, but it has given us access to greater depth as well, and we seem inclined to take advantage of the latter at the expense of the former. Replacing the printed page completely with the web page might be great for the most canonical works in the canon - future generations will not want for The Great Gatsby - but for the overwhelming majority of books, it's fairly close to a death sentence. They'll be everywhere at once but effectively nowhere at all.
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Frankly, and I know that this was not fair of me, but I neglected to discuss the main thrust of "The Battle of the Book", which led off with a fairly compelling idea before getting on to its worthy central, if less stimulating, point, which is the death of the book review in the mainstream media. You can obviously read TNR's contention for yourself: that major media outlets are public trusts; by reducing space allotted for literary criticism (or eliminating it altogether), papers are implicitly saying they don't consider books important; book reviews are "training for controversy," exercising their readers' critical faculties and creating a more intellectually-engaged polity. I agree with the ideas, though I'm curious as to why they are accorded the lion's share of the space when compared to the considerably more fundamental question of whether digitization will save the book or destroy it. Frankly, if we're concerned that people aren't reading the actual books, isn't worrying about whether or not the public is exposed to enough book reviews putting the cart before the horse? Nobody has responded to the death of physical music formats at the hands of digitization by lamenting that not enough people read Pitchfork. Granted, that is an imperfect comparison, but newspaper editors have been cutting back on literary criticism because people by and large don't seem to miss it. Try cutting out Sally Forth and you get a truckload of letters; cut the book reviews and the reaction is, "Pass the sports." I find it improbable that even if a Peace Corps of willing young literary critics were loosed upon the land that people would really open the Bunkville Picayune-Gazette and say, "What an engaging perspective on Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Not only do I wish to read that book, and several others that the author cleverly referenced, but I now feel more prepared to engage in the type of informed civic debate our society requires."*I'm not saying that God can't do whatever He wants, but if we accept that as the case, then isn't it a little ludicrous to feel the need to use scientific vocabulary to defend His actions? Isn't faith supposed to be belief in the absence of empirical evidence?
