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George Packer has taken some heat for mourning the way new media have crowded out time for books:
Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle. I’m sure Ambinder still reads books when he’s not on vacation, but it didn’t occur to him to include them in his account, and I’d guess that this is because they’re not a central part of his reading life.
And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took!
Speaking for the techno-utopian set, Matthew Yglesias fires back:
A person who chose to never read a single piece of post-1960 fiction could still live a rich and full life. He could even adopt a sneering attitude toward people who insisted on reading new novels. And people who subscribe to cable television (later: DVRs). And people who buy VCRs (later: DVD players). And people who read blogs (later: Twitter feeds). But what does it really amount to? To take advantage of new opportunities to do new things means, by definition, to reduce the extent to which one takes advantage of old opportunities to do old things. One shouldn’t deny that the losses involved are real—of course they are—but simply point out that it’s unavoidable. To say, “aha! this is the thing—this Twitter, these blogs—that’s crowded books out of my life” is a kind of confusion. Life is positively full of these little time-crunches. The fact that something displaces something of value doesn’t mean that it has no value, it just means that it’s new. To displace old things is in the nature of new things, and to cite the fact of displacement as the problem with the new thing really is just to object to novelty.
Yglesias is missing Packer's point. Packer is not making a version of the complaint that "nobody listens to records anymore and records are really cool." He's saying that he and many of his friends are reading fewer books and are unhappy about that fact. People who have DVRs don't complain about the fact that they don't watch their VCR anymore. Their unhappiness suggests that something more is going on here than people substituting a newer and better technology for an older one.
Packer is suggesting two factors at work. First, there's so much information to keep up with, as emails and blog posts and Twitter messages keep flying in, that people find themselves on an information treadmill they can't get off. Second, the constant imbibing of this information can alter our mental habits in such a way as to make long-form reading more difficult even when we do have the time. That's the point Packer is making when he says that he pulled out a volume of Kierkegaard and couldn't believe he had once been able to immerse himself in it. Maybe twentysomethings have managed to avoid this. Packer's complaint rings true to me.
COMMENTS (7)
I'm also with Packer, having noted myself in recent months that my capacity to read books has diminished as my Internet addiction intensifies. I once caught myself thinking of a long Times Mag article as "dead" text because there were no links (it referenced a chart I had seen online and I wondered briefly why I couldn't click on it). And while yes, something's gained/something's lost, I do think that there's a net loss if you read fewer books. You still can't study a subject in depth without reading books.
On the other hand...it's amazing these days how easy it is to download thick documents and data-sets online -- such as, say, a certain health care reform bill. (Was it Packer who underto ... view full comment
I'm also with Packer, having noted myself in recent months that my capacity to read books has diminished as my Internet addiction intensifies. I once caught myself thinking of a long Times Mag article as "dead" text because there were no links (it referenced a chart I had seen online and I wondered briefly why I couldn't click on it). And while yes, something's gained/something's lost, I do think that there's a net loss if you read fewer books. You still can't study a subject in depth without reading books.
On the other hand...it's amazing these days how easy it is to download thick documents and data-sets online -- such as, say, a certain health care reform bill. (Was it Packer who undertook to live-blog the stimulus bill?!) If you print a thick doc out, are you reading a "book"? And to what extent do people do so, as opposed to, say, printing out the table of contents and then diving in and out of the file online, perhaps printing chunks?
I suppose, as electronic book formats take hold and go to full web access, that the concept "book" might change -- books will have links, and perhaps the size of what we think of as a "book" (200-1000 pp?) will become more fluid.
Come on, people are reading more now and have access to greater information that they want to know than ever before. Right now I got 9 tabs open on various topics that 15 years ago I would have had limited access to. And to pretend I would be reading Conrad's Nostromo if not for this distraction is simply not true.
Beyond this, how about lamenting not loss of reading but loss of living? I don't twitter or facebook or the like because it is such a time suck. And after I leave work I don't have internet at my home. For heaven's sake, take a walk, ride a bike, get laid, go to the beach (or if you are in the north go to where ever it is you people go when it is cold and miserable outside)
Come on, people are reading more now and have access to greater information that they want to know than ever before. Right now I got 9 tabs open on various topics that 15 years ago I would have had limited access to. And to pretend I would be reading Conrad's Nostromo if not for this distraction is simply not true.
Beyond this, how about lamenting not loss of reading but loss of living? I don't twitter or facebook or the like because it is such a time suck. And after I leave work I don't have internet at my home. For heaven's sake, take a walk, ride a bike, get laid, go to the beach (or if you are in the north go to where ever it is you people go when it is cold and miserable outside)
"get laid..."
The 'not reading books' part is bad enough. Did you have to rub salt in the wound by bringing this up?
"get laid..."
The 'not reading books' part is bad enough. Did you have to rub salt in the wound by bringing this up?
"Maybe twentysomethings have managed to avoid this. "
Well, I'm 25 and I sometimes detest the information treadmill, wishing I had a more uncluttered mind. I was born in 1984, the year William Gibson coined the word "cyberspace," and I worry that growing up with the internet has damaged my prose style and attention span.
But on the whole, yeah, we are probably less apt to stare longingly at an old volume of Kierkegaard.
"Maybe twentysomethings have managed to avoid this. "
Well, I'm 25 and I sometimes detest the information treadmill, wishing I had a more uncluttered mind. I was born in 1984, the year William Gibson coined the word "cyberspace," and I worry that growing up with the internet has damaged my prose style and attention span.
But on the whole, yeah, we are probably less apt to stare longingly at an old volume of Kierkegaard.
Yglesias is right that the mere fact that x displaces y thing of value doesn't mean that x has no value. But, if x has little value, and y has much greater value, then the displacement is regrettable and, perhaps, to be resisted in some measure. Such is the case with worthwhile books. If we find that we are too busy dealing in relatively superficial bite-sized packets of information to delve more deeply into a subject or spend time with a work of literature, and, worse, losing the habit of focusing our minds for extended periods on such long-form works, then, yeah, that ought to be a source of concern. By the way, this is *not*, as Yglesias says, a "luddite" issue. A luddite is worried ... view full comment
Yglesias is right that the mere fact that x displaces y thing of value doesn't mean that x has no value. But, if x has little value, and y has much greater value, then the displacement is regrettable and, perhaps, to be resisted in some measure. Such is the case with worthwhile books. If we find that we are too busy dealing in relatively superficial bite-sized packets of information to delve more deeply into a subject or spend time with a work of literature, and, worse, losing the habit of focusing our minds for extended periods on such long-form works, then, yeah, that ought to be a source of concern. By the way, this is *not*, as Yglesias says, a "luddite" issue. A luddite is worried about the Kindle replacing printed books. A luddite is worried about technology. Packer's problem isn't really about technology. If everyone read tons of good books on their Kindle, Packer couldn't make this argument. The problem is the crowding out of the practice and routine of reading for depth.
By the way, blackton, I'm not sure that, when it comes to human beings, "living" amounts to sex and going for walks, which, for all their joy, are things that animals do too!
I don't agree with Packer. Twenty years ago, reporters weren't sitting around reading existentialist philosophy and great American classics, they were doing whatever the contemporary timesink was for reporters (watching TV news? scanning the broadsheets?). Those kinds of intellectual activities are replaced when you personally move from being a college student to a busy professional, not when your society moves from pre-Internet society to post-.
I don't think it's ludditism or anything - all kinds of people have been confusing personal change with technological change at least since the start of the Industrial Revolution - but I don't think Packer's position stands up to much scrut ... view full comment
I don't agree with Packer. Twenty years ago, reporters weren't sitting around reading existentialist philosophy and great American classics, they were doing whatever the contemporary timesink was for reporters (watching TV news? scanning the broadsheets?). Those kinds of intellectual activities are replaced when you personally move from being a college student to a busy professional, not when your society moves from pre-Internet society to post-.
I don't think it's ludditism or anything - all kinds of people have been confusing personal change with technological change at least since the start of the Industrial Revolution - but I don't think Packer's position stands up to much scrutiny.
Well, Simon, this is a factual question. Has reading of books declined? The below news story from 2004 cites an NEA study that says yes, and that blames, in part, electronic media. Google revealed other similar findings. So, I'm not sure we're merely wasting our time differently today, but that, as the NEA put it, "Johnny *won't* read," in part because Johnny is "consuming information" instead.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/08/national/main628194.shtml
Well, Simon, this is a factual question. Has reading of books declined? The below news story from 2004 cites an NEA study that says yes, and that blames, in part, electronic media. Google revealed other similar findings. So, I'm not sure we're merely wasting our time differently today, but that, as the NEA put it, "Johnny *won't* read," in part because Johnny is "consuming information" instead.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/08/national/main628194.shtml