It’s not that people aren’t reading, in fact I’d say that if Joe the Plumber is getting his news from Reuters online instead of the CBS Evening News then, in fact, literacy has increased. It’s the kinds of things that people are reading. The overall bend toward non-fiction has been a product of post-9/11 culture and its necessity to be grounded in fact. I think when the time comes that people are generally ready to read fiction on a massive scale again, they’ll be looking online more than they’ll be looking at Borders.

I also think that society is going to adjust to the changes brought on. The internet has been around for 40 years, remember, so as with all changes, it’s going to take a bit longer for society to be fully ready to deal with the consequences of constant availability.

Please don’t judge me by my vocabulary. You’re correct that I was an English/Creative Writing major, but I admittedly know very little about theory. I do read some criticism, but it’s the usual suspects: newspaper reviews, VQR, the Atlantic, Harpers, NYRB, etc. I don’t spend nights reading Irving Howe and H.L. Mencken by lamplight, though I’d probably get something out of it. As for “memes,” I get that from reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

I’m really not a partisan one way or another in this debate. I was trying to express my overall ambivalence about technology — there are certainly some aspects of it that I love (I don’t think I could give up my cell phone like Kunkel).

As for the library card image, it may be a romantic one, but it’s also true. For one example, check out this recent conversation on Ed Champion’s site. Several people in the comments talk about growing up poor and how essential libraries and bookmobiles were to their education.

Finally, I use the term ludditism (and I think I was wrong and that luddism is proper) to mean a few things. I think some degree of luddism or skepticism towards technology can be useful because it causes us to stop and think about what we’re doing, to assess if we like the direction in which things were going. But at the same time, writers, of fiction and non-fiction, must reckon with these ideas to remain relevant cultural contributors, and that’s why towards the end I mention that concerns about technology shouldn’t be relegated just to sci-fi writers or some other benighted sub-genre. Then again, many sci-fi writers are doing quite well (certainly in TV and film), and the New Yorker, of all places, has actually published some sci-fi/techno-tinged stories in the last year. (Off the top of my head I can think of Jonathan Lethem’s “Lostronaut” story and a recent one by an Israeli writer.)

Best,
Jacob

“Something must endure, and the history books—or whatever we create to contain and record our history—will not, I hope, be concerned with David at the Dentist or the latest celebrity nipple slip. That’s not to say that they don’t have their brief moments of (severely) relative importance, but these ephemera are clearly part of pop culture, not culture—full stop. But it also takes time, decades maybe, before we find what truly persists, despite our eagerness to anoint something as great or canonical.”

Nobody I know has anointed David at the Dentist as “canonical” or “great.” Actually, my father told me it was child abuse after I showed him the video. I don’t think our history books will be concerned with the latest nipple slip; I don’t believe you really think they will be either. Or maybe you do. I guess I don’t really know you. Yes, it takes time to find out what persists. Sometimes critics will even argue about whether something that has persisted deserves to have persisted for so long. Life is funny like that.

“After all, many of the elderly or the poor aren’t regular computer users. A kid living in poverty in East L.A. or East Timor may not have access to a cell phone or internet-connected computer, though he might have a library card or a few books (hence some of the recent arguments that widespread adoption of e-readers could impinge on book access for the poor). However, the hopes of the digital age—and those techno-evangelists who abet it…”

I think cell phones are a relatively cheap technological device. The population of many of the developing nations I have visited are quite dependent on them. Text messaging is one of the cheapest ways to contact a body. Internet cafes are legion. I believe most libraries in the United States have wireless; it might even be a requirement. The image of a poverty-hobbled child with a love for literature in his heart and a useless library card in his back pocket seems a bit Romantic.

Your use of phrases like “literary ecosystems” and “artificial ghettoes of genre” tells me you have read a lot of literary criticism and theory. You might have majored in English or Creative Writing. You also threw “memes” into your essay for good measure. Interesting. Anyway, I liked your piece. Really. I would write more and perhaps make a coherent argument, but I’m being distracted by other things I could do online (cheap ending- but I needed to end my rant!).