So I’m listening to Nicholas Carr being interviewed on NPR about his latest book about how the Internet is surgically removing our reading ability, and he explains how the idea for his grand thesis — which he buttresses with studies, surveys, interviews, and empirical and anecdotal evidence out the wazoo — came from observing his own diminished attentive capacity whilst browsing the Web. Suddenly, I had a realization: I’ve heard this interview before.

Jack . . . tell me, Jack. When did you first . . . develop this theory?

Well, I . . . first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Hmm.

Yes . . . a profound sense of fatigue . . . a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

In Kubrick’s fable, General Jack D. Ripper’s insecurity over his impotence leads inexorably to the nuclear destruction of the world. Similarly, Carr concludes that his flaccid attention span must be the result of the Internet sapping his precious neural fluids, and therefore he must launch a book-length first strike to prevent a vast conspiracy from taking root.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

An article of mine was recently published wherein I interviewed a college professor who wrote a book that was not, but should have been, titled The Kids Today: Why Today’s Whippersnappers Won’t Get Off My Lawn. In it, he claimed that today’s students were functionally less intelligent than previous generations of students in large part because they spend all their time string at tiny screens and only talking to their friends. His grand thesis — reinforced by the usual freight train of statistics — was sparked by his annoyance at the distracted behavior of his students and his own kids whenever he pontificated at them.

I don’t think it’s the Internet that’s sapping our precious bodily fluids.

Personally I blame the schools.

I’ve been reading a lot of the passionate articles and blog posts being written about both sides of the “death of the book” argument, and I’m beginning to sense a broad, vague, and completely unquantifiable pattern (one that I am not planning on launching any nuclear strikes over) — there seems to be a relationship between people’s opinion about the outmodedness of books and the way they experienced reading in school. The quick-n-dirty version of my gut feeling is this: People who claim that the Internet is freeing us from stuffy old boring literature probably weren’t inspired by their English teachers.

I mean, pick up any Clay Shirky interview at random and listen to him chant his mantra about how students won’t have to suffer through War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time anymore thanks to the Web. It’s like listening to the high school shop jock complaining about his English midterm exam. Who needs all that Dead White Male stuff, anyway? I want to go build engines.

And listen to any defender of traditional books; inevitably their argument will invoke the richness and layers of meaning that they found in books, the magical ability to be transported to another time and place in their imaginations, the worlds of possibility that books opened up for them. The Web will replace all that fresh fruit with crowd-sourced applesauce, they wail. They usually admit (with mock-sheepish pride) that they had been bookworms in school — staying up late to read under the covers, wandering through the shelves of used-book stores for hours on end, and on a first-name basis with the local librarian.

I am a writer and a lover of books in large part because I was fired up by passionate English teachers. And because language was the fire in me waiting to be stoked. It may sound trite, but my tenth-grade English teacher assigned the massive tome Of Human Bondage and it absolutely and completely transformed my life. Probably not so much the kid sitting next to me, whose passion maybe was chemistry and whose life was completely transformed by the cool and charmingly eccentric chemistry teacher, and who found the book to be too illogical and emotional. Or the kid in front of me, who was perhaps a gifted athlete and whose talents were fostered by our compact, pugnacious gym instructor, and who thought that reading literature was totally gay. Same book, three completely different and internally consistent reactions that will in some way affect each of their approaches to reading as adults.

Now say that any one of these three students goes on to develop the Internet’s dominant algorithm for assigning value to content. How would each one of them, when interviewed by Wired or NPR, rank the importance of making books like Of Human Bondage available to kids?

Generalizing outward from our own experience is always a risky thing. We’ll always find a study, an expert, a group, a news channel, a party that reinforces what we want to hear, what we “know in our gut” to be true. Big whoop. Doesn’t mean you’re right, just means a lot of people think the same way.

The funny thing is that I’m seeing all these Jack D. Ripper types on both sides of the debate relying on their respective echo chambers to bolster their arguments that the Internet will both free us from and ensnare us in just such a global echo chamber.

I love books, and I love e-books. I love reading on paper. I love reading on a screen. I will read them in a book. I will read them on a Nook. I will read them on a box. I will never, ever detox. I will always read more words, I will always read them, o you nerds.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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