The Book is Not Dead… But the Reader is on Life Support (+ Twitter Literacy)

There goes Chicken Little again, claiming that the sky is falling. There has been much renewed alarmism in the past five years on the topical issue of whether or not books are going the way of the butter-churner, the hansom cab, and the 8-track player. E-books continue their explosive growth, netting record profits, and yet the surplus of newly published books has continued apace.

Recently, I undertook to catalogue my entire library for insurance purposes (and as a handy reference for when I need bibliographical details for citing purposes). Yes, I know books occupy an obscene amount of space, are cumbersome to move about, and seem archaic in an era where we can fit the entirety of our libraries on our computer hard drive with so much more room to spare.

I, for one, enjoy the look and feel of books. Perhaps I fetishize them, but there is much to be said about the beauty of the book (and I admire how their spines occupy a fully book-cladded wall). I enjoy their binding, their smell, and their unique histories - something not present in the sterile and standardized form of digital text. They do not require recharging, and are still quite durable and portable (I can drop a book and not wince the way I might if I dropped a Nook or Kindle).

My concern is not that books have somehow become antiques, but that the patience and attention required for reading has been the real victim of this shift in the medium. New media optimists - the kind who make their names by lauding everything academia stands against - tell us that this is a new age for text. Those like Clay Shirky remind us that many of our canonical works may not be worth reading. What we want is information NOW. We don't want to have to work for it, wait for it. Give us the memes! Give us the keywords via the search engine algorithm! And with that comes a fundamental change in our textual great expectations.

In Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, he cites a variety of recent neuroscience studies that have been mapping the effects of digital media on our cerebral hardware - and the findings seem to confirm the suspicions of those like myself who are cynical devotees of technological determinism. Yes, hypertext is distracting. Yes, our being plugged in so often is a source of constant interruption. Yes, the depth of research and thought is compromised by severe cognitive switching costs as we snap (and must adjust) from one screen or popup or notification to another. The ultimate danger of such radical changes in our neural operations? I can think of a few:

1. Lack of cognitive depth (relying too heavily on working memory) might makes us more efficient at finding information, but information needs to be processed into knowledge. We are constantly gathering the ingredients for a cake that we will never bake.
2. Decrease in historical context and sustained reasoning. This has disastrous consequences for a democracy.
3. Attention deficits compromise deeper thought which, perhaps, makes us not so bright.
4. This lack of context and deeper reasoning increases ignorance, especially when it comes to understanding the world in which we live. This ignorance - which seems to be a baffling point of pride among those who malign intellectualism - will increase intolerance, violence, and repetition. I say that because I can hop into the comment pit at my local news site and see almost verbatim the same invective I have read in books from the 1920s. In addition, an ignorant, context-less society is so much easier to control and manipulate with less effort. It also means that politicians can simply appeal to emotions rather than reason.
5. It will privilege a lesser quality of thought. If you cannot make your point in two lines or less, the audience is becoming increasingly incapable of understanding what you are trying to convey. Not all knowledge can be communicated in two lines or less, and much of it takes time and development. When we do not afford that time, we lose out.
6. Without proper consideration of issues, without the careful posing of problems, all we will be capable of is short-term solutions.

I mentioned earlier about the apparent pride in being anti-intellectual. There is much clamour against the perception that the "elites" are running the show. This, of course, does not square with the facts (those who seek to confirm their beliefs are effectively immune to facts, it seems). In reality, much of our political landscape is dominated by those who do not belong to an intellectual elite class. Instead, it is governed by those who seek popular support by maligning intellectuals as being irrelevant know-it-alls whose main purpose is to raise taxes and live sinecure lives. Meanwhile, the politicians on the wave of corporate support are the ones living that sinecure life, using the intellectual as their convenient scapegoat. By drumming up the false perception that an intelligentsia is behind all the woes of a nation, this works to appease the "average" voter. Now that "average" continues to experience downward pressure with regard intellectual expectation, what we find lurking behind anti-intellectualism is really, in its naked form, an attempt to justify one's laziness.

But back to books and readers. When I say readers, I mean the serious kind, not the sort that points to the formulaic potboilers and sensationalist sweet nothings and calls that reading. Technically, yes, it is reading, but so is reading an ingredient label, a road sign, or comments on an online news story.

Recently, we read that Margaret Atwood was all-atwitter about Twitter, praising it for its benefits in increasing literacy. I would ask Atwood to please provide us with an operational definition of literacy, specifying what sort of literacy (since this is a complex concept that cannot be so easily reduced and simplified). What I think problematizes her claims would be the following:

1. Relying on communication media comparisons ("Twitter is like a smoke signal, a carving in a tree, a telegram" etc.) is not useful. Moreover, it is to commit a fallacy. Communication technologies of any kind have specific aspects to them that do not necessarily make them neatly comparable.

2. Atwood does not supply us with any real quantitative support to substantiate her claim that literacy is improving. First of all, what KIND of literacy? Second, prove the causal link or else you have committed post ergo propter hoc. Thirdly, anecdotal data (the tweets she follows does not constitute a more robust empirical study). Verdict: her opinion, which is unqualified in this respect.

3. How does she respond to the amount of redundancy and self-promotion on Twitter? How does that increase literacy?

4. I do not recall Atwood saying this whatsoever, but it is in the public discourse; namely, the idea that short-forms, misspellings, and other "alterations" on the English language represent a creative and dynamic reinvention of the language. This I do not buy. The poets and prose-writers who re-imagined the language did so with a purpose in mind. They did it for very real reasons, and knew the rules of the language. We should not coddle those who do not bother with the rules of language by praising their innovation when it is more likely it is ignorance or indolence. I fully agree that language is fluid and in constant re-negotiation over its lexical terms, its structures, and semantic flexibility, but not knowing how to properly use an apostrophe, for example, is not the way to push language forward.

And now I sound like a language Nazi. However, what is wrong with some of the linguistic rules we currently have on offer? Do we really need to spell words any which way as proof of our creativity? I can fully understand altering certain conventions of language such as gendered writing, or stock phrases such as "fair game" which are insensitive holdovers from a colonial past.

If Twitter is having such a tremendous positive impact on literacy, I would like to see the studies that show this to be the case.