Books and the net

People hears a lot of complaining that even though housemaids are thought once to have snatched half an hour under stairs to read the newest story by Jane Austen, now people just Google and Twitter. "It's for the reason that technology," say the complainers. However, writing and reading is the most important technology yet invented.

Each technology has 2 parts. One is external. In writing and reading it's the marks on paper or a few other medium. The other is internal. In writing and reading it's the skills to make and use the external marks. Every successful technology is taken up into society and creates a new niche, supported by new practices. The technology of writing and reading enables the externalization of thoughts, and it has led to the book, which has created a niche that is still thrives.

The net now gives a niche of quick access to news, quotations, images, information about people. Amazing! It offers us snippets, and frequently a clip is what we want. But the niche created by the book---both fiction and non-fiction--is one in which the reader is able to immerse him- or her-self deeply and continuously in a topic.

One reason this works is that many books, especially the famous books, have benefitted from the writer spending months or even years on a single piece of fiction or non-fiction.

It's famous, for example, that it took Gustave Flaubert six months of continuous and concentrated writing and rewriting, thinking and rethinking, to create his short story "A simple heart." He was keen to preserve for posterity all the plans, scenarios, and drafts through which he progressed to final versions of his fiction. "A simple heart" went through at least twelve versions before it reached its final form.

The book is a technology that allows us to benefit from the months or years of thoughtful concentration that a writer puts into a job. Is there any other that allows human being to concentrate so deeply, so extensively?

It's said that the net has somehow shortened our attention span. It looks alarming, but is it true? Access to a clip--a piece of information to which one attends for a few minutes--has been with us for some time. It arrived in good order in the nineteenth century with the coming of cheap paper and speedy type-setting which afforded us newspapers.

When I read the newspaper in the morning, I scan the headlines, spend a pair of minutes on a short article, spend perhaps seven or eight minutes on something that interests me. The snappy clip has also been given a new modality by the technology of television news. The newer-still technology of blogging enables me to create this post. It may take you three or four minutes to read it.

A few things do become obsolete when a new technology is introduced. By 1990, for example, the typewriter was doomed. But I can't see that the net is interfering with the niche of the book. The internet is about snippets, and it enables us to steer towards snippets of our own choosing, rather than just to receive those that journalists choose for us.

There are a few things that one doesn't want in bits and pieces. For these one desires to go all the way down, and to take one's time about it in a book. This is a technology that has not become obsolete.