Sometimes I feel like a broken record. I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less. (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).
Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.
I was planning on writing a post where I say: “Hey Ben Macintyre of The Times (UK), the Internet has NOT sucked dry our collective attention spans. In fact, because of the Internet, we’re actually constantly reading and writing and targetting our language to different audiences more. On top of that, storytelling is actually undergoing a revival (think This American Life, The Moth, SpeakEasy, and more).”
I was going to try to argue his column to death, pretend that I never got distracted by the Internet, that it’s never cut into my writing time, all to prove a point to Mr. Macintyre, but then I came across a post that gave me pause. It was too well-written not to quote. This post from the Electric Literature blog (by Helen Rubinstein) said everything that I’ve been thinking about the internet as distraction:
…lately, my morning tactic has been to try to write for as long as I can possibly bear before finally opening my window onto the living world. You know, the pretend-window that I pretend-open by pretend-pressing some pretend-buttons. On my computer screen, which is also my canvas, my instrument, my palette, and my page. Does any other art have it so hard?
Okay, email is a temptation, I know. But the post also says how you can’t make the leap to say that this distraction means the end of literature, the end of people’s attention spans for anything artful, the end of it all. And that’s what I was trying to say!
On principle, I’m reluctant to entertain any question that, like this one, reeks of literary doomsdayism. I hate hearing about the death of the novel, the poor prospects for literature today—all of it feels false, coming as it does at a time when people seem to be reading, in some form or another, quite a lot. I don’t like to believe that the spray of newfangled digi-stuff really represents such a monumental change, even for the literary world. We’re still communicating and we’re still living. We’re still making up stories and writing them down and giving them away to be read.
I guess this leaves us in limbo. The Internet is a paradigm shift and it isn’t. People are still writing and reading — the Internet hasn’t killed this — but it does, at times, tempt us with its distractions. Where does that leave us, writers and artists? Is the Internet in all its glory (Wikipedia, social media, YouTube) a boon for you and your work, creativity, and productivity? Or the opposite? Or something in between? The Electric Literature post doesn’t quite answer the question but beautifully states the problem. The Times article misses the point. I don’t have answers, but I’m just glad people are talking about it.
