Greg starts out this blogging endeavor with a post about reading. There are a number of ideas mingled in the post from computer technology making information more readily available to the fact that there is so much information out there. “And,” says Greg, “it’s because there is so much to do on a computer that people are straying away from books and other print media.”
I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home. But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?
The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page. There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.
writershall said
I’m not in anyway saying that books in a digital format are any less meaningful. What I’m getting at is more that people stray away from reading at all because of computers; right now most books are still in print so that’s the only choice they have to read.
And I do wholly agree with your inerpretation that a quiet and reflective reading might best be experienced with a printed page. I know that I’m always distracted by things on my computer, whether it’s instant messaging or my obsessive need to check me email.
More to the point, though, people tend to stray away from reading books because many times they don’t see a reason for it. With things like Spark Notes and Cliff Notes out and about on the internet, people read actual texts less because they can just look up a summary of it instead.
htillberg said
And I want to be clear that I found the sentiment of your post admirable, and I wanted to separate apart a love of the printed word and its demise in favor of more instantly gratifying entertainment.
I still feel that your comments are about a cultural shift, and what I am unclear about is whether computer technology forced this shift or whether since the Industrial Revolution, the shifting culture demanded the advances in technology…
nlowell said
As an active participant in ‘new media’ I’m finding this whole discussion fascinating.
One of the tenets, I believe of ‘new media’ is that it’s … well … new. The idea is that we have the ability to niche, create, and deliver information, entertainment, and even education using modes and mechanisms that didn’t exist before 1992.
Do these new media require new tropes? Do we need to develop a new cultural vernacular to accommodate them? How does shifting text to audio – or audio to text – or text to video – or radio to RSS – or FM to XM change what/how/what we write?
I’m looking forward to seeing what you think as the semester goes on.