28th
motoko
Great article in the Sunday paper by Motoko Rich outlining the various arguments over online reading. The best part is where the mom who’s trying to get her teenage daughter to read more (offline) finally finds a solution—Holocaust memoirs! The girl reads one; the girl reads another. She hasn’t seen the internet in days! Then the mom makes a strategic error—she gives the girl a work of “fantasy fiction.” And back goes the teenage girl to the internet.
A valuable lesson for parents.
The article also invokes the Atlantic piece from last month about whether Google makes us dumb, so I finally sat down and read it. It reminded me very much of a piece James Atlas wrote, it must be more than ten years ago, about how he was having trouble concentrating on real books and just wanted to read Vanity Fair all day. The magazine. Somehow it had nothing to do with Google and its nefarious plans to improve its search engine, and everything to do with getting older and more distracted.
And I have to say the Atlantic article caused me to experience what I can only define as blogger rage. This guy gets to put together a flimsy tissue of intellectual *associations* in a national magazine while I sit here in the basement, blogging, just because his half-conclusions flatter the prejudices of that magazine’s readers?
But then I ate some cookies and I thought: It’s ok. As a blogger I may also be asked by another national magazine, or even *the same national magazine*, to flatter the obverse side of the very same prejudices and tell those readers that in fact we’ve discovered this thing called the internet which is a magic pill that will solve all our problems if only we just tell that to ourselves often enough. And I felt better.
Nice thing we’ve got going here, this “pro-internet,” “anti-internet” debate.
