Literacy And New Media

I just wanted to bring to your attention an interesting discussion going on over at a friend's blog. It all started out as something of a lament about the decline of second hand book stores but is now dealing with things like literacy and gaming. All the action's in the comments. Read on and get involved by posting over there.

Here are some excerpts by a variety of authors:

"this is not about print versus internet, but about serious intellectual engagement with literature by a culture versus superficial engangement with literature, or no engagement at all. This is orthogonal to print versus internet, at least insofar as those media are equally hospitable to the sorts of texts that drive literary culture (though I am not sure that they are, to put it mildly)."

"Bookstores are not closing down because people are starting to read books online. No one I know reads books online. They are closing because people are simply reading less, there is a decay in our literary culture."

"YouTube most clearly indicates the new, and in my view inevitable, trend away from writing back towards an oral/visual culture."

"One further thing to add about the decline of the local bookstore and the rise of the internet is the phenomenon of Amazon, of course. The internet has not only made many industries virtual, it has also enabled an incredible centralisation that has destroyed local business cultures of many different kinds."

"Some random thoughts of some values of long prose: the massive and detailed role of the imagination in interacting with long textual works (as an aside, this is also why avant garde music has always been better than mainstream music, but that is a rant for another time), the inherent suitability of text to building an argument, the way engaging with complex texts better enables us to communicate with one another, the brand of sheer aesthetic joy that can only be produced by an encyclopaedic novel"