I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed about The Poacher's Son by Shelley Irwin of WGVU radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can listen to me talk about the book and how I came to write it here.
Good News for Novelists?
Over at the Wall Street Journal Clay Shirky says that, yes, the Internet is transforming our lives and societies in unexpected ways. But he suggests that people like Nick Carr are missing the larger context of these changes:
Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.
Shirky even marshals Martin Luther and Edgar Allan Poe to help make his argument:
Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World's Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.
That always happens too. In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals, and complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing." Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, concluded, "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."
The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.
If we believe that humans benefit from being able to concentrate for extended periods of time, it behooves us to heed Shirky's message. Kids won't learn to read novels unless we teach them the pleasures and rewards of doing so.
Bad News for Novelists?
In his new book The Shallows, Nick Carr argues that "in the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us." Carr believes that our increasing reliance on digital technology is eroding our capacity for contemplative thought. He elaborates on this alarming idea in an interview over at The Atlantic:
What sets the Internet apart from radio and television—earlier mass media—is that the Net doesn't just process sound and video. It processes text. I think it's fair to say that the written word is extremely important to our intellectual lives and our culture. Until recently text was distributed through the printed page, which encouraged immersion in a single narrative or argument. With the Net, text becomes something that can be broadcast electronically the way sound and pictures can be. So you begin to see the same habits of thought: distracted, hurried, and (I would argue) superficial. What we're seeing is a revolution in textual media.
Since immersion in a single narrative is pretty much the textbook definition of reading a novel, this doesn't augur well for people in my line of work.
Update on 2010-06-08 11:28 by Paul Doiron
Michael Agger has an interesting review of The Shallows over at Slate. I like this quote from Nick Carr:
Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet.
Lost Fawn
Here's a bittersweet story that highlights some of the unusual (and occasionally melancholy) responsibilities of the Maine Warden Service. Travis Barrett from Inland Tracks has the details:
Essentially, a group of contractors were working near Bangor last Friday when they found a deer fawn that didn’t want to leave the danger-zone of a highway. Not far from the fawn, the workers found the fawn’s mother — which had been killed in an apparent collision with a car. The men contacted Warden Jim Fahey, brought the fawn with them (inside their truck!) to IF&W headquarters in Bangor, and Warden Eric Rudolph collected the fawn and drove it to a rehabilitation center in Mount Desert Island.
Here's hoping the fawn can be released into the wild again, ideally in a place with fewer roads.
Moose Movie
Maine is famous for its moose, but one place we don't usually encounter them is in the basements of our former textile mills. In this video, shot last year by a friend of mine named Josh Povec, one lucky young moose gets a little help escaping the "big city" of Camden for more leafy environs.