I had just started reading Motoko Rich‘s Sunday NY Times feature on the debate over whether the Internet is eroding our literary rates when GalleyCat correspondent Amanda ReCupido emailed me with her own take:
“Yes, in the Twitter age, there is something to be said about our attention spans, but also something to be said for the way we now respond immediately, keeping writing (and reading) current and constantly refreshed and put to the test. The internet has introduced a whole new meaning to writing and accountability. Just take a look at the number of comments that emerge after blog posts to determine reader engagement and response levels. Writing in this forum not only incites discussion, but encourages it, and creates an experience that completed books cannot offer. Books are finite, whereas the Internet creates a conversation. Think of blogs and websites as Oprah’s book club for the new generation.
“Another argument is that reading on the internet is too disjointed. Kids are IM-ing but not necessarily creating a ‘reading’ experience, and most websites are so cluttered with video and pictures that the original message is lost. I don’t see anything wrong with daily practice in communicating via written word, though, and having visual support for one’s argument is also a tactic encouraged by formal education. Linking to other blogs and websites that share your own sentiment is what we used to call ‘citing sources’ back in the age of scholarly term papers. And this kind of varied reading may even be enhancing the reader’s cognitive abilities.”
I’ll tell you what jumped out at me in the early paragraphs: the story of the teenage girl who spends several hours a day reading online, including a lot of fanfiction (“stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies,” Rich explains), to which her mother resignedly sighs that at least she’s reading something. Now, my direct experience with fanfic is fairly limited, but from what little I’ve seen, I can tell you this much—while it’s true that just about anybody can post a fanfic story online, in order to actually gain an audience, you’ve got to be the kind of writer who can combine intimate familiarity with the source material and imaginative storytelling technique. And more than a few of the people who read fanfic wind up writing it, or at least trying to, at some point, challenging themselves intellectually in the process, as the young girl in the article does. (Rich notes, by the way, that the girl is an excellent student.) Sure, it’s a legal gray area, but this girl’s fanfic hobby is hardly anything for her mother to worry about.
In fact, apart from a dyslexic youth who finds it a lot easier to pinpoint the information he needs through online searches, the teens Rich interviewed don’t hate reading books; it’s just a matter of finding the right stories to capture their attention. For the girl, it might be a Holocaust memoir by Livia Bitton-Jackson; for an 18-year-old boy, it’s The Fountainhead. (As long as there are teenage boys, Ayn Rand will always have a readership.)
This reminds me a lot over the old debate over whether comic books were making kids into sloppier readers, from the invocation of the “intellectual equivalent of empty calories” bogeyman to the objections over the “cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds” in digital media, which is just a high-tech version of the complaints over the alleged distractions of graphic storytelling.
But my favorite passage was this one:
“Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site about a mythical species known as the ‘Pacific Northwest tree octopus.’ Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.”
Question: How many editors at the New York Times read Judith Miller‘s reporting on Iraq’s weapons programs and deemed those articles a reliable source? How many editors at the New York Times read Jayson Blair‘s reporting on, frankly, just about anything? Should we then conclude that NYT editors are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy?
Also, that’s a really slick home page for the Pacific Northwest tree octopus.