
The Printed Word in Peril - diodorus
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/the-printed-word-in-peril/
======
coffeefirst
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.

------
emodendroket
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
> _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.

~~~
emodendroket
Sure, and once upon a time Mr. Ed was wildly popular. Nonetheless, nobody
would start off an article about the death of television by complaining that
he asked a roomful of people and nobody had watched it recently.

~~~
coldtea
That's because television is a real time medium. At best you get re-runs.
Reading is an on-demand medium, and popular authors can very well stay on the
reading lists of subsequent generations, the way Mailer himself would have
read Melville, Hemingway, Poe, James, and so on.

TV is also shallowly based on technical quality (people wont see black and
white shows etc), whereas the written word on paper is a stable technology for
centuries, if not millennia.

~~~
ghaff
>television is a real time medium

Arguably that's less the case than it used to be insofar as you can get your
hands on many older TV shows if you want to.

That said, TV--and, especially, historic network TV--is a lot more rooted in
its time and place than a lot of writing is. It's partly for technical reasons
as you say. The production values of a lot of older shows are going to be a
distraction even if the content were otherwise modern. But TV shows also tend
to reflect (to an arguably greater degree than the typical film) the period in
which they were made. Not just the look but a lot of the sensibilities.

I'd wager than there are very few TV shows dating to the 1970s and before that
are really watchable today whereas there are plenty of films going back to
almost the beginning of "talkies." (There are some good silent films too but
obviously those have to be approached with a somewhat different mindset.)

There are some exceptions. For example, episodes of The Twilight Zone or a
series like M _A_ S*H can still be appreciated, but for the most part, no.
(ADDED: For example, All in the Family was a groundbreaking show when it
aired. But, although I haven't seen an episode in years, I'm willing to bet it
would come across as very much a period piece today.)

~~~
fsiefken
Some other exceptions; Dr. Who, Pippi Longstocking, Battlestar Galactica,
Logan's Run, Star Trek, The Tripods, Chocky, Colditz, Cosmos with Carl Sagan,
all good series which are still watchable

~~~
ghaff
I think you're being very generous--or at least not representative of people
in general. Even a lot of the original Star Trek doesn't hold up very well
and, personally, I didn't care for about half that list even at the time they
aired.

------
cproctor
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.

------
cafard
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.

------
jrf6
What is BDDM? It is used throughout, and I can't find a plausible definition
anywhere.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
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._ "

------
SolaceQuantum
_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
> 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
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
Wow, I was led totally astray by mention of "diversity quotas," which weren't
even your words. Sorry.

------
teddyc
Trees rejoice!

~~~
justtopost
Paper production replants trees. Its not saviving any forrests. I would argue
the enviromental toll from kindles and cellphones is magnatudes worse.

~~~
hrktb
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.

