Reading What?

This article, "Books Without Batteries: The Negative Impacts of Technology" by Bill Henderson, is something of a plug for his new book, "Book Love." I think it's a challenging and heartening perspective on the powers of technology and our response to embrace it, or not.

The resent onslaught of e-readers was announced with a veneer of the best of intentions. The book needed improving, said one maven, who also sells diapers and soup online. An MIT visionary predicted that in five years we will read almost no paper books – just digital devices. The book would become a relic, a collector’s item, the e-experts agreed. And of course with the death of the book, our bookstores and libraries would wither and die.

The e-experts said that in the future all information and literature would be available on the device of the moment (sure to be replaced by the device of the next moment). You may never have to leave the comfort of home or bed. The latest bestseller – indeed, millions of out-of-print books (you didn’t know you needed so many) – could be had at the click of a button. This was billed as an improvement.

Lots of people are making lots of money telling us this is for our own good. Tweeting away, we never stop to think. In fact, we may be losing out ability to think.

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010), Nicholas Carr notes that after years of digital addiction, his friends can’t read in depth anymore. Their very brains are changing, physically. They are becoming “chronic scatterbrains… even a blog post of more that three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.”

Carr continues: “For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg made reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind on Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”

Because our brains can no longer think beyond a tweet, we can’t write well. And we can’t read well either. The idea of reading – let alone writing – War and Peace, Bleak house, or Absalom, Absalom! is fading into an impossible dream.

In any case, what serious writer would create exclusively for an e-reader? It’s like farting into the wind. Writers hope, mostly in vain, that their work will endure for a few years or even centuries, in handsome printed and bound volumes. Why bother at all if your words are to be digitized into instantly accessible and disposable battery-dependent gas?



Part 2 soon to come!