Email and Post-Literacy
Clifford Orwin on email and "post-literacy":
Reading and writing are activities that presuppose leisure. The great age of letter writing was the 18th century, when the letters, like the novels, were serious literary compositions often running to considerable length. The voluminous correspondences of that day remains engrossing in ours because of the thought and care lavished on them by serious people for whom the complementary activities of reading and writing lay at the core of their existence. When John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson, or vice versa, it was a major event in the lives of both, and each strove to be worthy of the other. E-mail, on the contrary, is the medium of communication of the frenetic, who don't want to spend a second more than necessary whether composing or responding to it. [...] Simplification of the language is the essence of e-mail, which is to say, in the end, impoverishment of it. (The substitution of letters and numbers for words, in particular, seems ingenious to the semiliterate.)
In a followup, Orwin writes: “I must face it: The heads of most of my students are anywhere but in their books. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that so many of them hold full-time jobs while pretending to be full-time students. If I could change just one thing in their lives, that would be it. I would liberate them to concentrate on their studies rather than to work so hard to fund them that they lack the time and energy to do them justice.” Yeah? With what money?
In the rest of the article, at least, he notes that he is trying to strike a balance between "old books" and contemporary media and technology. It sounds like he's saying what I've felt about "old books", that while they may be worth reading, so much of our culture is infused with it what has been written in old books that one can just pick up the old culture by swimming in today's culture. The Simpsons is an excellent example of the type of show that references about 30 significant developments in culture, old and new, in each episode.
Quoting from a book, American Gods, that I haven't finished reading (not even close), this from Mr. Wednesday: “Ah yes, the age of information [...], not, of course, that there has been any other age. Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style.”
