5 ms·

The Printed Word in Peril

27 points by diodorus 8y ago

SolaceQuantum 8y ago
The printed books being sold are not the sort of difficult reading that spearheads knowledge transfer but picture books, kidult novels like the Harry Potter series, and, in the case of my own UK publisher at least, a great tranche of spin-off books by so-called vloggers (a development Marshall McLuhan anticipated when he noted that new media always cannibalize the forms of the past). I feel an issue behind this essay is that it makes assumptions of the purpose of literature. That literature should be difficult to read, and that difficult works are the only works that transfer knowledge, is not reflected in contemporary understanding of literature... anywhere. Although there are essays discussing the merit of difficult literature, they have always been in response to an equal or greater number of essays denigrating difficult literature. I began to lose faith in the power of my own imagination, and realized, further, that to look at objects on a screen and then describe them was, in a very important sense, to abandon literature, if by this is understood an art form whose substrate is words alone. This isn't true either. Literature has not (perhaps never been) purely a substrate of words. For much of history literature involved pictures, diagrams, spoken word. One only needs to look at modern mixed-media poetry to see that literature does not rely only on words. It is traditionally viewed this way but this view doesn't reflect the reality of literature. And then we cleave to this new intimacy, one shorn of all the contingencies of sex, race, class, and nationality. This isn't true either. Lots of literature is written involving the above, including many of the works referenced here. Even writing about this is its own contingency of nationality, as it heavily references national statistics of only one nation. Moreover, the determination to effect cultural change—by the imposition of diversity quotas—is itself an indication of printed paper’s looming redundancy. Diversity quotas the way the author is referencing here either don't exist of have always existed in the form of "women's literature" (a term itself having undergone controversy long before technology's prime). Discussing diversity in literature must also acknowledge that women have always been writing. In fact, throughout the years, women have been a good number of contemporary bestsellers in their time. The only discussion would then be to discuss why women's literature are only rarely considered literature as relevant to the culture from which the literature is produced- but this discussion has been ongoing long before technology's time! An example is right in this essay, in which JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is simultaneously a cultural phenomenon and worth no literary merit whatsoever (described as "kidult")! In short, I don't think this point is relevant at all to technology. It was only when finishing this essay that I fully admitted to myself what I’d done: created yet another text that’s an analysis of our emerging BDDM life but that paradoxically requires the most sophisticated pre-BDDM reading skills to fully appreciate it. With all due frankness (and my degree in English literature) this attitude of requiring sophistication in communication as fundamentally superior communication (as stated multiple times in his rhetoric) is not an established case. This essay should be read as an opinion of one guy on the state of literature and not the reflection of literature as a whole- and likely not even reflecting contemporary established academic views on this matter.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  > I feel an issue behind this essay is that it makes assumptions of the purpose of literature. That literature should be difficult to read, and that difficult works are the only works that transfer knowledge, is not reflected in contemporary understanding of literature... anywhere. Although there are essays discussing the merit of difficult literature, they have always been in response to an equal or greater number of essays denigrating difficult literature. "Literature" in the sense he's using it doesn't refer to every work of fiction. I don't know that literature has to be challenging to be good (A Farewell to Arms is pretty universally recognized and it isn't long or difficult), but an audience that reflexively gravitates only toward YA novels is demonstrating a certain lack of desire for thinking. The number of political takes I read that involve analogy to a children's book about wizards is somewhat hard to look at without thinking that our current literary environment engenders a lack of critical thinking. I don't know that women's literature has "always" been respected; why did Emily Bronte (among many other Victorian woman authors) write under a male pseudonym?
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    Please note I specify that women's literature distinctly has not always been respected and in fact is rarely considered reflective classical literature of the time of the work.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Wow, I was led totally astray by mention of "diversity quotas," which weren't even your words. Sorry.
teddyc 8y ago
Trees rejoice!
- justtopost 8y ago
  Paper production replants trees. Its not saviving any forrests. I would argue the enviromental toll from kindles and cellphones is magnatudes worse.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    You'd have to consider how long somebody uses a Kindle and how many books they would have bought to really start to make this comparison, I'd think.
  - hrktb 8y ago
    Any of those has non trivial impacts. Your claim is valid, but we should take into account that cutting trees and planting new ones is not the same a leaving the trees alone in term of ecosystem. Just like burning down an old town an rebuilding a new one is not neutral in term of things lost.
emodendroket 8y ago
The Norman Mailer anecdote seems strange. I think I read more than average; I finish about 30 books a year, most of which are literary fiction or history books. Still, I haven't read a Norman Mailer book anytime recently. There's literally thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world; why him, in particular? Some other things that strike me: I agree that a phone or iPad isn't much good for reading a novel, but I love reading on my Kindle (and the built-in dictionary makes it easier to approach foreign-language works, although I still don't do this as often as I feel I ought to). The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one? The distraction of always-on Internet is certainly real, though, and exacerbated by smartphones. And it is striking that even journalists and political leaders often don't seem very well-read, particularly when you go back and look at 19th-Century rhetoric rife with allusions to the Bible or Greek myth that are opaque to much of the modern audience.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >The Norman Mailer anecdote seems strange. I think I read more than average; I finish about 30 books a year, most of which are literary fiction or history books. Still, I haven't read a Norman Mailer book anytime recently. There's literally thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world; why him, in particular? Well, 4-5 decades ago ago he was for US mainstream literature world what Led Zeppelin were for 70s hard rock fans... So, the essay author explains very well why he asked the question: to show the very short span of literary glory, from someone who was ubiquitous and celebrated not long ago. He also adds, when 2 out of 300 raise a hand: "Frankly I was surprised it was that many". Half a century or so ago, and for a long time before that, people didn't just chose from "thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world" -- they knew the authors of their time, and the times before, with many overlaps that formed a canon, not a free choice among thousands of works (if that, since many don't read that much, period). >The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one? Does it matter? Both are comparatively recent -- there are people alive in the US who were born when none of them (radio, tv) were available at any home.
cproctor 8y ago
I find particularly interesting the claim that the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony. Drawing on Bakhtin, we can see BDDM (bi-directional digital media) as having precisely the qualities previously celebrated in the novel: Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves-some better, some worse-to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline. ... The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re-formulating and re-accentuating them... Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized... Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel... What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing- the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present). I don't know, I'm excited about computational media and the new kinds of reading and being we're developing. I wish we could make space for this in school without having to wait another 50 years.
jrf6 8y ago
What is BDDM? It is used throughout, and I can't find a plausible definition anywhere.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  It's defined in the essay. > "I referred above to “bidirectional digital media,” by which I mean the suite of technologies that comprises the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the World Wide Web, and the internet. Henceforth I’ll abbreviate this term to BDDM."
coffeefirst 8y ago
There's two major oversights in all the arguments like this: 1. Books are more analogous to vinyl than they are to CD's. People think they're cool, they like having bookshelves. In the age of screens, having something physical that you can set on a coffee table is refreshing. Print might be more niche, but it will no go anywhere in our lifetimes. 2. It assumes that digital reading experiences are inherently the way we see them right now. I can't for the life of me read anything lengthy on my phone, but I'll tear through thick old books on Kindle. A big part of that is the kindle screen will show almost the same number of words as a printed page. My iPhone shows less than half of that. Paragraphs that read smoothly in print or E-ink devices don't even fit on the screen. Social posts and tiny snippets fit well. Throw in some notifications and why would anyone be able to stay undistracted while using a phone? The more I look at these things the less it looks like something inherent to print and digital and more like a collection of design decisions and consequences on what happens in the screens, not the screen themselves.
cafard 8y ago
Hard to say. "In March, I gave an interview to the Guardian in which I repeated my usual—and unwelcome—assertion that the literary novel had quit center stage of our culture and was in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony." Hard to say. Various authors role out big literary novels at their pace: Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen come to mind, and they get respectable reviews. "Furthermore, I fingered BDDM as responsible for this transformation, the literary novel being simply the canary forced to flee this particular mine shaft first." I don't think that the RSPCA made it to the coal mines back then. At the moment, I'm a bit too BDDMed to follow the argument all the way, though.

27 points by diodorus 8y ago

The printed books being sold are not the sort of difficult reading that spearheads knowledge transfer but picture books, kidult novels like the Harry Potter series, and, in the case of my own UK publisher at least, a great tranche of spin-off books by so-called vloggers (a development Marshall McLuhan anticipated when he noted that new media always cannibalize the forms of the past). I feel an issue behind this essay is that it makes assumptions of the purpose of literature. That literature should be difficult to read, and that difficult works are the only works that transfer knowledge, is not reflected in contemporary understanding of literature... anywhere. Although there are essays discussing the merit of difficult literature, they have always been in response to an equal or greater number of essays denigrating difficult literature. I began to lose faith in the power of my own imagination, and realized, further, that to look at objects on a screen and then describe them was, in a very important sense, to abandon literature, if by this is understood an art form whose substrate is words alone. This isn't true either. Literature has not (perhaps never been) purely a substrate of words. For much of history literature involved pictures, diagrams, spoken word. One only needs to look at modern mixed-media poetry to see that literature does not rely only on words. It is traditionally viewed this way but this view doesn't reflect the reality of literature. And then we cleave to this new intimacy, one shorn of all the contingencies of sex, race, class, and nationality. This isn't true either. Lots of literature is written involving the above, including many of the works referenced here. Even writing about this is its own contingency of nationality, as it heavily references national statistics of only one nation. Moreover, the determination to effect cultural change—by the imposition of diversity quotas—is itself an indication of printed paper’s looming redundancy. Diversity quotas the way the author is referencing here either don't exist of have always existed in the form of "women's literature" (a term itself having undergone controversy long before technology's prime). Discussing diversity in literature must also acknowledge that women have always been writing. In fact, throughout the years, women have been a good number of contemporary bestsellers in their time. The only discussion would then be to discuss why women's literature are only rarely considered literature as relevant to the culture from which the literature is produced- but this discussion has been ongoing long before technology's time! An example is right in this essay, in which JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is simultaneously a cultural phenomenon and worth no literary merit whatsoever (described as "kidult")! In short, I don't think this point is relevant at all to technology. It was only when finishing this essay that I fully admitted to myself what I’d done: created yet another text that’s an analysis of our emerging BDDM life but that paradoxically requires the most sophisticated pre-BDDM reading skills to fully appreciate it. With all due frankness (and my degree in English literature) this attitude of requiring sophistication in communication as fundamentally superior communication (as stated multiple times in his rhetoric) is not an established case. This essay should be read as an opinion of one guy on the state of literature and not the reflection of literature as a whole- and likely not even reflecting contemporary established academic views on this matter.

emodendroket 8y ago
> I feel an issue behind this essay is that it makes assumptions of the purpose of literature. That literature should be difficult to read, and that difficult works are the only works that transfer knowledge, is not reflected in contemporary understanding of literature... anywhere. Although there are essays discussing the merit of difficult literature, they have always been in response to an equal or greater number of essays denigrating difficult literature. "Literature" in the sense he's using it doesn't refer to every work of fiction. I don't know that literature has to be challenging to be good (A Farewell to Arms is pretty universally recognized and it isn't long or difficult), but an audience that reflexively gravitates only toward YA novels is demonstrating a certain lack of desire for thinking. The number of political takes I read that involve analogy to a children's book about wizards is somewhat hard to look at without thinking that our current literary environment engenders a lack of critical thinking. I don't know that women's literature has "always" been respected; why did Emily Bronte (among many other Victorian woman authors) write under a male pseudonym?
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  Please note I specify that women's literature distinctly has not always been respected and in fact is rarely considered reflective classical literature of the time of the work.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Wow, I was led totally astray by mention of "diversity quotas," which weren't even your words. Sorry.

teddyc 8y ago

Trees rejoice!

justtopost 8y ago
Paper production replants trees. Its not saviving any forrests. I would argue the enviromental toll from kindles and cellphones is magnatudes worse.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  You'd have to consider how long somebody uses a Kindle and how many books they would have bought to really start to make this comparison, I'd think.
- hrktb 8y ago
  Any of those has non trivial impacts. Your claim is valid, but we should take into account that cutting trees and planting new ones is not the same a leaving the trees alone in term of ecosystem. Just like burning down an old town an rebuilding a new one is not neutral in term of things lost.

emodendroket 8y ago

The Norman Mailer anecdote seems strange. I think I read more than average; I finish about 30 books a year, most of which are literary fiction or history books. Still, I haven't read a Norman Mailer book anytime recently. There's literally thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world; why him, in particular? Some other things that strike me: I agree that a phone or iPad isn't much good for reading a novel, but I love reading on my Kindle (and the built-in dictionary makes it easier to approach foreign-language works, although I still don't do this as often as I feel I ought to). The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one? The distraction of always-on Internet is certainly real, though, and exacerbated by smartphones. And it is striking that even journalists and political leaders often don't seem very well-read, particularly when you go back and look at 19th-Century rhetoric rife with allusions to the Bible or Greek myth that are opaque to much of the modern audience.

coldtea 8y ago
>The Norman Mailer anecdote seems strange. I think I read more than average; I finish about 30 books a year, most of which are literary fiction or history books. Still, I haven't read a Norman Mailer book anytime recently. There's literally thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world; why him, in particular? Well, 4-5 decades ago ago he was for US mainstream literature world what Led Zeppelin were for 70s hard rock fans... So, the essay author explains very well why he asked the question: to show the very short span of literary glory, from someone who was ubiquitous and celebrated not long ago. He also adds, when 2 out of 300 raise a hand: "Frankly I was surprised it was that many". Half a century or so ago, and for a long time before that, people didn't just chose from "thousands of years' worth of literature from all over the world" -- they knew the authors of their time, and the times before, with many overlaps that formed a canon, not a free choice among thousands of works (if that, since many don't read that much, period). >The idea that books have to compete with more stimulating technologies isn't new either: radio, movies, and TV were there first. Is this a wholly new trend or the acceleration of an existing one? Does it matter? Both are comparatively recent -- there are people alive in the US who were born when none of them (radio, tv) were available at any home.

cproctor 8y ago

I find particularly interesting the claim that the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony. Drawing on Bakhtin, we can see BDDM (bi-directional digital media) as having precisely the qualities previously celebrated in the novel: Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves-some better, some worse-to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline. ... The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re-formulating and re-accentuating them... Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized... Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel... What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing- the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present). I don't know, I'm excited about computational media and the new kinds of reading and being we're developing. I wish we could make space for this in school without having to wait another 50 years.

jrf6 8y ago

What is BDDM? It is used throughout, and I can't find a plausible definition anywhere.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ThrowawayR2 8y ago
It's defined in the essay. > "I referred above to “bidirectional digital media,” by which I mean the suite of technologies that comprises the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the World Wide Web, and the internet. Henceforth I’ll abbreviate this term to BDDM."

coffeefirst 8y ago

There's two major oversights in all the arguments like this: 1. Books are more analogous to vinyl than they are to CD's. People think they're cool, they like having bookshelves. In the age of screens, having something physical that you can set on a coffee table is refreshing. Print might be more niche, but it will no go anywhere in our lifetimes. 2. It assumes that digital reading experiences are inherently the way we see them right now. I can't for the life of me read anything lengthy on my phone, but I'll tear through thick old books on Kindle. A big part of that is the kindle screen will show almost the same number of words as a printed page. My iPhone shows less than half of that. Paragraphs that read smoothly in print or E-ink devices don't even fit on the screen. Social posts and tiny snippets fit well. Throw in some notifications and why would anyone be able to stay undistracted while using a phone? The more I look at these things the less it looks like something inherent to print and digital and more like a collection of design decisions and consequences on what happens in the screens, not the screen themselves.

cafard 8y ago

Hard to say. "In March, I gave an interview to the Guardian in which I repeated my usual—and unwelcome—assertion that the literary novel had quit center stage of our culture and was in the process, via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony." Hard to say. Various authors role out big literary novels at their pace: Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen come to mind, and they get respectable reviews. "Furthermore, I fingered BDDM as responsible for this transformation, the literary novel being simply the canary forced to flee this particular mine shaft first." I don't think that the RSPCA made it to the coal mines back then. At the moment, I'm a bit too BDDMed to follow the argument all the way, though.