This Is Probably An Interesting Blog (but in the offhand chance it isn't…)

The ever-brilliant George Packer does some necessary unpacking of our new media revolution:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution.

I feel I use Twitter pretty regularly — or at least more regular than most — and in my own experience, I find myself aligning more with David Carr’s conclusions in his NYT essay, Why Twitter Will Endure, than Packer’s critical approach. For myself, I’m discovering the most enjoyable function of the service is my window into the lives and thoughts of scientists, policy experts and humanities professors; and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that its been part of my comprehensive education. I’ve learned much through my exposure to Twitter and experts on the internet, and I’m consuming it willfully, which is more than I can say for much of my college education.

At the same time though, I can understand Packer’s point; that the continual evolution (or devolution) of technological discourse will only see messaging become simpler, not more complex. We’re trapped in a bell curve and after the plateau of the print age, we’re sharply dropping in our ability to effectively communicate complex thoughts and subjects. I resonate with the way Packer phrases it:

There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.

This is the line I walk; a tight-rope rising high between RSS readers and paperback novels. It’s a scary thought, but one that keeps my nose in books.