IS IT POSSIBLE TO READ ANYTHING SERIOUS ON A COMPUTER?
I found myself grimacing the other night during Jon Stewart's funny interview with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, who was on "The Daily Show" promoting the release of the Kindle 2. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a Luddite. I believe that e-mail and Facebook are ultimately forces for good. But when it comes to e-books, I can't help but experience flashes of reactionary alarm.
My concern is not really that we will loose books as physical objects (though I'd be sad to see the book go), but that that the concentration, care and reflection intrinsic to literary reading will diminish if physical books are to be phased out. Susan Greenfield, a prominent neuroscientist, recently made headlines with the hardly surprising claim that Facebook and similar sites mar the attention span and social skills of young people. Surely this effect will only be compounded if books become one of many things we access on all-purpose electronic devices. The Kindle isn't there yet, but it seems poised to be so soon.
It's unavoidable that technology will not only change how we publish, but also the way we read (in the bath and otherwise). Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, gave a speech at a recent publishing conference in New York City (discovered via TheBrowser.com) in which he described great literature as something composed under "priestly supervision". Literary greatness, he said, is produced by "highly specialised individuals struggling at their desks in deep seclusion." That sounds about right to me. As a corollary I would argue that literature requires a similarly intense effort on the part of the reader to be properly understood and enjoyed. I just don't think it's possible to read well when social networking sites--or alternate e-books or content from hundreds of publications, as the Kindle proudly offers--are a mere tab away. The same goes for literary criticism.
In an intriguing book called "Proust and the Squid", Maryanne Wolf argues that the next generation will think differently, with or without e-books. "The addictive immediacy and the overwhelming volume of information available in the 'Googled world' of novice readers invite neither time for concentrated analysis and inference nor the motivation for them to think beyond all the information given," she wrote in a letter to the New Yorker in response to an excellent review of her book.
Doesn't sound good. Is it possible to read anything serious on a computer, iPhone or Kindle?
Picture credit: aprilzosia (via Flickr)
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Scientists have been reading
February 27, 2009 - 21:59 — Visitor (not verified)Scientists have been reading serious things on computer screens for years now. When they go at it they do it for hours at a time, reading journal articles and deciphering data.
The reason why facebook and other such electronic medium mars the attention span of the readers is because of the content, not the medium.
The key is discernment, not the medium
March 1, 2009 - 00:02 — Nate Shivar (not verified)I do believe that it is possible to read seriously on a computer, but only as long as it is treated as serious. In other words, I don't think that there is anything inherent in the medium that causes us to treat a work seriously or not. I can disregard a book of excellent literature in print just as easily as I could if on a Kindle (think about your first impression of a bound library book). However, there may be a correlation in that we are so accustomed to digital information being non-serious that we lump the good stuff together with it. The key, then, is to discern what is serious and what is not beforehand, so change mental gears in order to treat it as such.
proofreading tip
March 1, 2009 - 15:26 — Visitor (not verified)"Any goose can spell loose."
Not as bad as all that
March 2, 2009 - 17:15 — Michael Skeet (not verified)I was given an e-book reader last Christmas, and last month I tried it out on a Caribbean vacation. I had no trouble whatever spending eight hours (and more) a day, for ten straight days, reading on the device -- and what I was reading was The Economist, the New Yorker, and what I could get for free from Project Gutenberg (so: Wells, Dumas, and Tales of Old Japan by Baron Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford).
I am in no doubt whatever that I couldn't have stood reading this material on a computer screen (or a mobile phone) -- not for eight hours a day, at any rate. The glare produced by a computer screen really does mitigate against spending too much time reading that way, something evidenced by the headache I had developed by the time I wrote this comment, at the end of a ten-hour day in front of a computer.
The point is that devices like Sony's Reader (my model) and the Kindle don't have screens the way computers have, and thus generate no glare. Reading this way is in some respects even more comfortable than reading hard copy: my Reader weighs considerably less than most books I'm interested in, and I can turn pages with the same hand that's holding the Reader, thus freeing up the other hand to manipulate a rum punch.
I still read from physical books and magazines: few good e-books are available from the public library yet, and something about The Economist demands that I read it in the bath. So for me the advent of e-books marks an extension to my current reading, not a substitution or -- perish forbid -- a reduction.
As for the dumbing-down hypothesis, I agree with the earlier commenter: that's the result of the content, not the medium.
Of course you can
March 17, 2009 - 06:58 — Visitor (not verified)How young are you?
Reading has to have an ergonomic quality..or simplicity, that makes the reader comfortable enough to engage the pages [or screen fully]. Printing presses are sooooo 20th century. and this screen reading will become more efficient and culturally more acceptable.
I'm going to try the Kindle 2 out...ASAP, designers will just keep logging our complaints and making these things easier to use.
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