Tele[re]visionBy Jenny Price ’96 Society gives parents p.docx

Tele[re]vision
By Jenny Price ’96
Society gives parents plenty of reasons to feel guilty about the
time their children spend in front of the television.
Nicknames for the medium – boob tube or idiot box, for
example – do little to help alleviate their worries.
For years, researchers have shown the negative effects of TV
violence and, more recently, they have found links between
childhood obesity and too much viewing. President Obama
implored parents to “turn off the TV” during a campaign ad
pitching his education policy. Still, the average child in the
United States spends nearly four hours watching television each
day, even though pediatricians recommend no more than two
hours of educational programming for kids two years and older.
TV viewing is a given in the average household, but in many
cases, parents have no idea what programs their children are
watching or whether they understand them at all.
“What we seldom get – and need – is solid, research-based
advice about when to turn the TV on,” noted Lisa Guernsey, an
author and journalist who covers media effects on children, in a
column she wrote for the Washington Post.
Researchers, including UW-Madison faculty and an alumnus
who is behind some groundbreaking work in the field, are
working to fill that void, showing that some TV can actually be
good for kids.

Their efforts have improved educational programming for
children, pinpointing what engages their developing brains and
how they learn as they watch. Now the researchers are exploring
whether children are really getting the lessons from programs
that adults think they are, and how exposure to television might
affect children as young as babies and toddlers.
Spoonful of Sugar
Well-crafted shows for children can teach them the alphabet,
math, and basic science concepts, as well as manners and social
skills. But what really makes for good television when it comes
to younger viewers? That’s a key question Marie-Louise Mares
MA’90, PhD’94, a UW-Madison associate professor of
communication arts, is trying to answer.
Much of the educational programming aimed at children falls
into the category of “prosocial” – meaning that it’s intended to
teach lessons, such as healthy eating habits, self-esteem, or how
to treat others. The classic example of a prosocial program is
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Mares has shown that a prosocial
program’s positive influence can be just as strong as a violent
program’s negative influence.
But good messages can get lost.
“Children’s interpretations of what a show is about are very
different from what an adult thinks,” Mares says. “Some kids
take away the completely wrong message.”
Mares began studying children’s comprehension of prosocial
messages after watching the movie Mary Poppins with a four-
year-old fan. Although the child predicted each scene before it
appeared on screen, she had difficulty doing what Mares calls
“making sense of the story.” The girl did not know why the
character Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke, was on the roof

dancing or that the “spoonful of sugar” Julie Andrews sings
about was a metaphor. As they continued to watch the movie
together, Mares learned that what is obvious to an adult doesn’t
necessarily sink in with children.
She demonstrated that confusion in a study involving a TV
episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog, in which the cartoon
character and friends meet a three-legged dog named K.C. The
intent of the program was to teach children to be accepting of
those with disabilities. But throughout much of the episode,
Clifford and his friends behave badly toward the dog. At one
point, one of the dogs expresses fear of catching three-legged
dog disease. Sure enough, in follow-up interviews, one-third of
the children thought the dogs could catch the disease, and many
of them interpreted the lesson of the episode along the lines of
this child’s comment: “You should be careful … not to get sick,
not to get germs.”
“Showing the fear can actually be more conflicting and more
frightening to kids,” Mares says.
Her findings are important because much of kids’ programming
attempts to teach lessons by showing characters behaving badly
in some way and then having them learn better behavior. That’s
confusing for children, Mares says, and could even lead them to
focus on the bad behavior.
In the end, 80 percent of the kids in the study said the lesson of
the Clifford episode was to be nice to dogs with three legs.
Although that’s a nice sentiment, Mares says, “You don’t
encounter many [three-legged dogs].”
The producers of prosocial programs also should consider the
methods they use to portray the behaviors they’re trying to
teach kids, Mares says, as well as ensure that the content is
relevant and realistic to young viewers. That might be one of

the reasons why stories involving dogs or other animal
characters don’t seem to get the message across to children. One
group of youngsters in Mares’ study watched a Clifford episode
that had been edited to remove the dogs showing fear of K.C. –
yet the children still interpreted the story as being about dogs,
not about inclusiveness and tolerance.
Mares is in new territory; virtually no research has been
conducted to identify programming that would effectively foster
inclusiveness in children. She has experimented, with mixed
results, by embedding some kind of prompt within children’s
programs that could help young viewers comprehend the
intended message, especially since most parents aren’t watching
along with their kids. Attempts include having the main
character start off the show or interrupt mid-lesson to say, “Hey
kids, in this story we’re going to learn that we shouldn’t be
afraid of people who are different.”
She’s still looking for answers on how that practice – which she
calls scaffolding – could work effectively. But balance is
essential, Mares says, noting that she could create the “ideal”
show, but then kids wouldn’t want to watch.
Making over Sesame Street
The end of the 1960s saw the debut of two landmark educational
programs for young people: Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood. Not long after, Daniel Anderson ’66 began
trying to discover what exactly was going on with children
while they watched TV.
Anderson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst who has advised the producers of children’s shows
including Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, dispelled one of
the central myths on the subject – that when the TV is turned
on, children’s brains turn off. In fact, parents are more likely

than their children to become couch potatoes while watching
television, says Anderson, who holds a UW bachelor’s degree in
psychology.
He observed children watching television and witnessed them
turning away from the screen several times during a broadcast
to play with toys, fight with siblings, or talk to their parents.
After they were done watching, he tested their understanding of
what they had just seen. Anderson’s findings were the exact
opposite of what most people thought.
“It was very clear that children were mentally active, that they
were constantly posing questions for themselves, [asking],
‘What’s going to happen next, why are they doing that … is this
real?’ ” he says. “And it was also clear that when television
invited participation, that kids would become very active –
pointing at the screen or talking to the characters on the TV.”
This finding ushered in a new era of children’s programming,
with the cable channel Nickelodeon enlisting Anderson’s help to
develop a new generation of shows in the late 1990s, most
notably Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer, that were centered
on the concept that children would dance, sing, and follow
along with programs they enjoyed rather than sit and stare
vacantly at the screen.
Blue’s Clues features a mix of animated characters – including
a cute blue puppy – and backgrounds, with a live host who
invites children who are watching to look for and decipher clues
to solve a puzzle, such as, “What does Blue want for her
birthday?” Along the way, the show focuses on information
such as colors or shapes or numbers.
Anderson pushed producers to make the show visually simple,
with very little editing or transitions that require viewers to
process jumps in time or location – something young children
have a hard time doing, his research showed.

While most researchers “focus on the negative contributions of
media,” experts such as Anderson and Mares have been “at the
forefront of recognizing that television that is designed to be
educational really can be beneficial for children,” says Amy
Jordan, who oversees research on children’s media policy for
The Annenberg Public Policy Center.
In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, which examines how
ideas and trends spread, author Malcolm Gladwell labeled
Blue’s Clues as one of the “stickiest” – meaning the most
irresistible and involving – television shows ever aired, and
noted that its creators “borrowed those parts of Sesame Street
that did work.”
In turn, the success of Blue’s Clues prompted the producers of
Sesame Street to seek Anderson’s help in giving the long-
running staple a makeover. With the new millennium
approaching, the show needed to catch up with the way kids
watch TV. Rather than the repetitive narrative format children
delighted in following as they watched Blue’s Clues, Sesame
Street featured a series of about forty short segments, ranging in
length from ten seconds to four minutes.
“The original conception was that you needed a lot of novelty
and change to hold a preschooler’s attention. And so they quite
explicitly would put things together in unpredictable orders,”
Anderson says. “A story that was
happening on the street with Big Bird and the human characters
might be followed by a film about buffalos, which in turn might
be followed by a Muppet piece about the letter H.”
Sesame Street offered children no connection or context among
the concepts and segments, and, not surprisingly, it lost viewers
when shows like Blue’s Clues began airing. At Anderson’s
suggestion, producers made the

show more storylike and predictable, reducing the number of
characters
and sets, and connecting more concepts. Now the typical
episode features around ten segments per hour.
“You’re dealing with children who don’t need complexity,”
Anderson says. “In a sense, a lot of what they were doing was
almost for the adults and not so much for their audience.”
Research Gap
The notion of children and television as a research prospect first
confronted Anderson when he was a young assistant professor.
He had just given an undergraduate lecture on child
development, in which he said younger children tend to have
more trouble sustaining attention than older children, when one
of his students asked, “Well, if those things are true, how come
my four-year-old brother can just sit and stare [at Sesame
Street]?”
“I kind of glibly answered him,” Anderson recalls, “that ‘Oh,
it’s because television is just being a distractor. It just looks
like your brother’s sustaining attention, but the picture is
constantly changing and so on.’ I just made that up – I had no
idea.”
Feeling guilty, Anderson sent a
graduate student to the library with orders to find out
everything he could about children’s attention to television.
“He kept coming back and saying he couldn’t find anything, and
that’s what got me started,” Anderson says.
Beginning in the 1980s, Anderson and his colleagues followed
570 children from preschool until high school graduation to see
what effect watching Sesame Street had on their school

performance, behavior, and attitudes. They found that children
who had watched when they were young earned better grades in
high school, read more books, placed more value on
achievement, and showed less aggression. Anderson’s study
included controls for many other factors, including family size,
exposure to media in adolescence, and parents’ socioeconomic
status.
“We think that the effects are really traceable and cumulative
all the way, at least, through high school. So television, I think,
can be a powerful educator,” Anderson says.
Jordan says those findings hold up in other research.
“Television that has a clear curriculum in mind – that studiously
avoids problematic content like violence – has been shown in
dozens of studies to really enhance the way children think, the
kinds of things that they know, and even how they get along
with one another,” she says.
An Uncontrolled Experiment
So where does that leave guilt-ridden parents looking for
answers about television? It seems it comes down to what and
how much kids are watching, and at what age.
Anderson, who has been working in the field for decades, thinks
that despite educational programming, children are growing up
within a vast, uncontrolled experiment. And he draws a sharp
distinction about TV’s potential value for children over age
two.
His recent research focuses on how very young children are
affected by simply playing or spending time in a room where
adult programming, such as news programs or talk shows, is on
the television. Anderson’s latest study observed what happened
when fifty children ages one to three played in a room for an

hour. Half of the time, there was no TV in the room; for the last
thirty minutes, the game show Jeopardy! – not exactly a toddler
favorite – was showing.
The conventional wisdom, based on previous research, was that
very young children don’t pay attention to programs that they
can’t understand. But Anderson’s study found clear signs that
when the television was on, children had trouble concentrating,
shortened and decreased the intensity of their play, and cut in
half the time they focused on a particular toy.
When the TV was on, the children played about ninety seconds
less overall. The concern is whether those effects could add up
and harm children’s playtime in the long term, impairing their
ability to develop sustained attention and other key cognitive
skills.
The Annenberg center’s Jordan says more studies looking at the
effects of TV on younger children are essential, in part because
surveys have found that as many as two-thirds of children six
years and under live in homes where the TV is on at least half
the time, regardless of whether anyone is watching.
“Babies today are spending hours in front of screens … and we
don’t really understand how it’s affecting their development,”
she says. “We can no longer assume children are first exposed
to TV when they’re two years old because it’s happening at a
much younger age.”
Jenny Price ’96 is a writer for On Wisconsin.
Wonder Woman
The Life, Death, and Life After Death of Henrietta Lacks,
Unwitting Heroine of Modern Medical Science
Photo courtesy the Lacks’ family

Henrietta Lacks
By Van Smith | Posted 4/17/2002
On Feb. 1, 1951, Henrietta Lacks--mother of five, native of
rural southern Virginia, resident of the Turner Station
neighborhood in Dundalk--went to Johns Hopkins Hospital with
a worrisome symptom: spotting on her underwear. She was
quickly diagnosed with cervical cancer. Eight months later,
despite surgery and radiation treatment, the Sparrows Point
shipyard worker's wife died at age 31 as she lay in the hospital's
segregated ward for blacks.
Not all of Henrietta Lacks died that October morning, though.
She unwittingly left behind a piece of herself that still lives
today.
While she was in Hopkins' care, researchers took a fragment of
Lacks' tumor and sliced it into little cubes, which they bathed in
nutrients and placed in an incubator. The cells, dubbed "HeLa"
for Henrietta Lacks, multiplied as no other cells outside the
human body had before, doubling their numbers daily. Their
dogged growth spawned a breakthrough in cell research; never
before could investigators reliably experiment on such cell
cultures because they would weaken and die before meaningful
results could be obtained. On the day of Henrietta's death, the
head of Hopkins' tissue-culture research lab, Dr. George Gey,
went before TV cameras, held up a tube of HeLa cells, and
announced that a new age of medical research had begun--one
that, someday, could produce a cure for cancer.
When he discovered HeLa could survive even shipping via U.S.
mail, Gey sent his prize culture to colleagues around the
country. They allowed HeLa to grow a little, and then sent some
to their colleagues. Demand quickly rose, so the cells were put
into mass production and traveled around the globe--even into
space, on an unmanned satellite to determine whether human
tissues could survive zero gravity.
In the half-century since Henrietta Lacks' death, her tumor
cells--whose combined mass is probably much larger than Lacks
was when she was alive--have continually been used for

research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic
substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific
pursuits. Dr. Jonas Salk used HeLa to help develop his polio
vaccine in the early '50s. The cells are so hardy that they took
over other tissue cultures, researchers discovered in the 1970s,
leading to reforms in how such cultures are handled. In the
biomedical world, HeLa cells are as famous as lab rats and petri
dishes.
Yet Henrietta Lacks herself remains shrouded in obscurity. Gey,
of course, knew HeLa's origins, but he believed confidentiality
was paramount--so for years, Henrietta's family didn't know her
cells still lived, much less how important they had become.
After Gey died in 1970, the secret came out. But it was not until
1975, when a scientifically savvy fellow dinner-party guest
asked family members if they were related to the mother of the
HeLa cell, that Lacks' descendants came to understand her
critical role in medical research.
The concept was mind-blowing--in a sense, it seemed to Lacks'
family, she was being kept alive in the service of science. "It
just kills me," says Henrietta's daughter, Deborah Lacks-
Pullum, now 52 and still living in Baltimore, "to know my
mother's cells are all over the world."
In the 27 years since the Lacks family serendipitously learned
of Henrietta's unwitting contribution, little has been done to
honor her. "Henrietta Lacks Day" is celebrated in Turner Station
each year on Feb. 1. In 1996, prompted by Atlanta's Morehouse
College, that city's mayor proclaimed Oct. 11 Henrietta Lacks
Day. The following year, Congress passed a resolution in her
memory sponsored by Rep. Robert Ehrlich (R-Md.), whose 2nd
District includes Turner Station, and the British Broadcasting
Corp. produced a documentary on her remarkable story. Beyond
that, however, virtually nothing has been done to celebrate
Lacks' contribution--not even by Hopkins, which gained
immeasurable prestige from Gey's work with her cells.
Lacks-Pullum is bitter about this. "We never knew they took her
cells, and people done got filthy rich [from HeLa-based

research], but we don't get a dime," she says. The family can't
afford a reputable lawyer to press its case for some financial
stake in the work. She says she has appealed to Hopkins for
help, and "all they do is pat me on my shoulder and put me out
the door."
Hopkins spokesperson Gary Stephenson is quick to point out
that Hopkins never sold HeLa, so it didn't make money from
Henrietta's contribution. Still, he says, "there are people here
who would like something done, and I'm hoping that at some
point something will be done in a formal way to note her very,
very important contribution."
Lacks-Pullum shares those hopes, but she is pessimistic.
"Hopkins," she says, "they don't care."
Lost in the acrimony over ethical and financial issues stemming
from Henrietta Lacks' cells, though, is Henrietta Lacks herself.
A descendant of slaves and slaveholders, she grew up farming
the same land on which her forebears toiled--and that her
relatives still farm today. As part of an aspiring black middle
class with rural roots, she left her childhood home to join a
migration to Baltimore, where Bethlehem Steel was eager to
hire hard workers from the country. She was in the midst of
realizing an American dream when her life was cut short. And
her cells helped realize society's larger dreams for health and
knowledge. As such, she's been called a hero, a martyr, even a
saint. But during her life, as Ehrlich said to his colleagues in
Congress, Henrietta Lacks "was known as pleasant and smiling,
and always willing lending a helping hand." That she did, in
more ways than she ever knew.
DIRECTIONS: WRITE A FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY
ANSWERING THE FOLLOWING QUESTION. PLEASE
INCLUDE ONE DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE ESSAY TO
SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT. REMEMBER THE FIVE
PARAGRAPHS SHOULD CONSIST OF A THESIS, THREE
BODY PARAGRAPHS AND A CONCLUSION. FOR THIS

ESSAY YOU CAN USE PERSONAL PRONOUNS SUCH AS: I,
ME, MY, WE, US, OUR. HOWEVER, YOU CANNOT USE
CONTRACTIONS.
QUESTION: DO YOU THINK IT WAS FAIR FOR JOHNS
HOPKINS TO NOT COMPENSATE THE LACKS’ FAMILY?
WHY OR WHY NOT? PLEASE USE EXAMPLES FROM THE
ARTICLE TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
reproduction prohibited without permission.
REVOLUTION IN A BOX
Kenny, Charles
Foreign Policy; Nov/Dec 2009; 175; ProQuest Central
pg. 68

T H E W I L S O N Q U A R T E R L Y
In the Beginning
Was the Word
The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as
we
daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images.
The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.
B Y C H R I S T I N E R O S E N
In August, the company that owns Reader’s
Digest filed for bankruptcy protection. The maga-
zine, first cobbled together with scissors and paste in
a Greenwich Village basement in 1922 by De Witt
Wallace and his wife, Lila, was a novel experiment in
abridgement—in 62 pages, it offered Americans con-
densed versions of current articles from other peri-
odicals. The formula proved wildly successful, and by

midcentury Reader’s Digest was a publishing empire,
with millions of subscribers and ventures including
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which sold
abridged versions of best-selling works by authors
such as Pearl Buck and James Michener. Reader’s
Digest both identified and shaped a peculiarly Amer-
ican approach to reading, one that emphasized con-
venience, entertainment, and the appearance of
breadth. An early issue noted that it was “not a mag-
azine in the usual sense, but rather a co-operative
means of rendering a time-saving device.”
The fate of Reader’s Digest would have been of
interest to the late historian and Librarian of Con-
gress Daniel Boorstin. In his renowned 1962 book The
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis: A
Journal of
Technology and Society.
Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boor-
stin used Reader’s Digest as an example of what was
wrong with a culture that had learned to prefer image
to reality, the copy to the original, the part to the
whole. Publications such as the Digest, produced on
the principle that any essay can be boiled down to its
essence, encourage readers to see articles as little
more than “a whiff of literary ectoplasm exuding
from print,” he argued, and an author’s style as littered
with unnecessary “literary embellishments” that
waste a reader’s time.
Today, of course, abridgement and abbreviation
are the norm, and our impatience for information has
trained even those of us who never cracked an issue
of Reader’s Digest to prefer 60-second news cycles to

62 condensed pages per month. Free “aggregator”
Web sites such as The Huffington Post link to hun-
dreds of articles from other publications every day,
and services such as DailyLit deliver snippets of nov-
els directly to our e-mail in-boxes every morning.
Our willingness to follow a writer on a sustained
journey that may at times be challenging and frus-
trating is less compelling than our expectation of
being conveniently entertained. Over time, this atti-
48 W i l s o n Q u a r t e r l y ■ A u t u m n 2 0 0 9
Intrepid readers browse the charred Holland House library after
a London air raid in 1940.
tude undermines our commitment to the kind of
“deep reading” that researcher Maryanne Wolf, in
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain (2007), argues is important from an
early age, when readers learn to identify with char-
acters and to “expand the boundaries of their lives.”
As Boorstin surveyed the terrain nearly half a
century ago, his overarching concern was that an
image-saturated culture would so distort people’s
sense of judgment that they would cease to distin-
guish between the real and the unreal. He criticized
the creation of what he called “pseudo-events” such
as politicians’ staged photo-ops, and he traced the
ways in which our pursuit of illusion transforms our
experience of travel, clouds our ability to discern the
motivations of advertisers, and encourages us to ele-

vate celebrities to the status of heroes. “This is the
appealing contradiction at the heart of our passion for
pseudo-events: for made news, synthetic heroes, pre-
fabricated tourist attractions, homogenized inter-
changeable forms of art and literature (where there
are no ‘originals,’ but only the shadows we make of
other shadows),” Boorstin wrote. “We believe we can
fill our experience with new-fangled content.”
Boorstin wrote The Image before the digital age,
but his book still has a great deal to teach us about the
likely future of the printed word. Some of the effects
of the Internet appear to undermine Boorstin’s occa-
sionally gloomy predictions. For example, an increas-
ing number of us, instead of being passive viewers of
A u t u m n 2 0 0 9 ■ W i l s o n Q u a r t e r l y 49
The Future of the Book
images, are active participants in a new culture of
online writing and opinion mongering. We comment
on newspaper and magazine articles, post our reviews
of books and other products online, write about our
feelings on personal blogs, and bombard our friends
and acquaintances with status updates on Facebook.
As the word migrates from printed page to pixilated
screen, so too do more of our daily activities. Online
we find news, work, love, social interaction, and an
array of entertainment. We have embraced new modes
of storytelling, such as the interactive, synthetic world
of video games, and found new ways to share our
quotidian personal experiences, in hyperkinetic bursts,
through microblogging services such as Twitter.

Many observers have loudly and frequently
praised the new technologies as transformative and
democratic, which they undoubtedly are. But their
widespread use has sparked broader questions about
the relevance and value of the printed word and the
traditional book. The book, like the wheel, is merely
a technology, these enthusiasts argue, and thus we
should welcome improvements to it, even if those
improvements eventually lead to the book’s obsoles-
cence. After all, the deeply felt human need for sto-
rytelling won’t fade; it will merely take on new forms,
forms we should welcome as signs of progress, not
decay. As Boorstin observed in the foreword to the
25th-anniversary edition of The Image, “We Ameri-
As scientists begin to bear
read online
as scan.
rest jumped around, picking out
individual words and processing
Nielsen recommends that de-
easy to comprehend by scanning:
one idea per paragraph, highlighted
all the temptations dangled before
brains are naturally inclined to
with dopamine, the overlord of
causes you to check your e-mail

meaningful message—or following
a link to a stimulating site—is
W
Scientists are only beginning to
answer this question. A recent
study by three Stanford research-
ers found that consummate multi-
tion, controlling their memories,
50 ■
down on the cognitive differences
between reading online and off,
they are discovering that the two
activities are not the same at all.
Numerous studies have shown
that we don’t so much
In a series of studies from
the early 1990s until 2006, Jakob
Nielsen, a former Sun Microsys-
tems engineer, and Don Norman, a
cognitive scientist, tracked the eye
movements of Web surfers as they
skipped from one page to the next.
They found that only 16 percent of
subjects read the text on a page in
the order in which it appeared. The
them out of sequence. “That’s how
users read your precious content,”
Nielsen cautions Web designers in

his online column. “In a few sec-
onds, their eyes move at amazing
speeds across your Web site’s words
in a pattern that’s very different
from what you learned in school.”
signers create Web sites that are
keywords, and objective-sounding
language so readers don’t need to
perform the mental heavy-lifting of
determining what’s fact and what’s
bias or distortion.
It is particularly hard to hold
readers’ attention online because of
them. Psychologists argue that our
constantly seek new stimuli. Click-
ing on link after link, always look-
ing for a new bit of information, we
are actually revving up our brains
what psychologist Jaak Panksepp
has called the “seeking system.”
This system is what drives you to
get out of bed each day, and what
every few minutes; it’s what keys
you up in anticipation of a reward.
Most of your e-mail may be junk,
but the prospect of receiving a

enough to keep your brain con-
stantly a bit distracted from what
you’re reading online.
hat are the effects on the
brain of all this distraction?
taskers are, in fact, terrible at mul-
titasking. In three experiments,
they were worse at paying atten-
and switching between tasks than
T his Is Your Brain on the Web
W i l s o n Q u a r t e r l y A u t u m n 2 0 0 9
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cans are sensitive to any suggestion that progress
may have its price.”
O
ur screen-intensive culture poses three chal-
lenges to traditional reading: distraction,
consumerism, and attention-seeking behav-
ior. Screen technologies such as the cell phone and
laptop computer that are supposedly revolutionizing

reading also potentially offer us greater control over
our time. In practice, however, they have increased
our anxiety about having too little of it by making us
available anytime and anywhere. These technologies
have also dramatically increased our opportunities for
distraction. It is a rare Web site that presents its
material without the clutter of advertisement, and a
rare screen reader who isn’t lured by the siren song of
an incoming e-mail’s “ping!” to set aside her work to
see who has written. We live in a world of continuous
partial attention, one that prizes speed and bran-
dishes the false promise of multitasking as a solution
to our time management challenges. The image-
driven world of the screen dominates our attention at
the same time that it contributes to a kind of experi-
ence pollution that is challenging our ability to engage
with the printed word.
The digital revolution has also transformed the
experience of reading by making it more consumer
those who prefer to complete one
task at a time. Clifford Nass, one of
the researchers, says, “ They’re
suckers for irrelevancy. Everything
distracts them.” Unable to discrim-
inate between relevant material
and junk, multitaskers can get lost
in a sea of information.
The things we read on the Web
aren’t likely to demand intense
focus anyway. A survey of 1,300

students at the University of
Illinois, Chicago, found that only
five percent regularly read a blog or
forum on politics, economics, law,
or policy. Nearly 80 percent
checked Facebook, the social net-
working site.
Maryanne Wolf, director of the
Center for Reading and Language
Research at Tufts University, says
it’s not just what we read that
shapes us, but the fact that we read
at all. She writes, “With [the inven-
tion of reading], we rearranged the
very organization of our brain,
which in turn expanded the ways
we were able to think, which
altered the intellectual evolution
of our species.” When children are
just learning to read, their brains
show activation in both hemi-
spheres. As word recognition be-
comes more automatic, this activ-
ity is concentrated in the left
hemisphere, allowing more of the
brain to work on the task of dis-
tilling the meaning of the text and
less on decoding it. This efficiency
is what allows our brains the time
to think creatively and analytically.
According to Wolf, the question is,
“What would be lost to us if we
replaced the skills honed by the
reading brain with those now

being formed in our new genera-
tion of ‘digital natives’ ?”
In the end, the most salient dif-ference isn’t between a screen
and a page but between focused
reading and disjointed scanning.
Of course, the former doesn’t nec-
essarily follow from opening a book
and the latter is not inherent to
opening a Web browser, but that is
the pattern. However, that pattern
may not always hold true. Google,
for example, recently unveiled Fast
Flip, a feature designed to recreate
the experience of reading news-
papers and magazines offline.
Other programs, such as The New
Yorker’s digital edition or The New
York Times’ Times Reader 2.0, have
a similar purpose, allowing read-
ers to see on the screen something
much like what they would nor-
mally hold between their two
hands. And with the Kindle and
other e-readers quickly catching
on, we may soon find that reading
in the future is quite like reading in
the past.
Until such innovations move
into wider use, the surest bet for
undistracted reading continues to
be an old-fashioned book. As his-
torian Marshall Poe observes, “A
book is a machine for focusing

attention; the Internet is [a]
machine for diffusing it.”
—Rebecca J. Rosen
oriented. With the advent of electronic readers (and
cell phones that can double as e-readers), the book is
no longer merely a thing you purchase, but a service
to which you subscribe. With the purchase of a tra-
ditional book, your consumer relationship ends when
you walk out of the bookstore. With a wirelessly con-
nected Kindle or iPhone, or your Wi-Fi–enabled
computer, you exist in a perpetual state of potential
consumerism. To be sure, for most people reading has
never been a pure, quasi-monastic activity; every-
day life has always presented distractions to the per-
son keen on losing herself in a book. But for the first
time, thanks to new technologies, we are making
those distractions an integral part of the experience
of reading. Embedded in these new versions of the
book are the means for constant and elaborate
demands on our attention. And as our experience
with other screen media, from television to video
games to the Internet, suggests, such distractions
are difficult to resist.
Finally, the transition from print reading to screen
reading has increased our reliance on images and led to
a form of “social narcissism” that Boorstin first identified
in his book. “We have fallen in love with our own image,

with images of our making, which turn out to be images
of ourselves,” he wrote. We become viewers rather than
readers, observers rather than participants. The “com-
mon reader” Virginia Woolf prized, who is neither
scholar nor critic but “reads for his own pleasure, rather
than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of
others,” is a vanishing species. Instead, an increasing
number of us engage with the written word not to sub-
mit ourselves to another’s vision or for mere edification,
but to have an excuse to share our own opinions.
In August, Stanford University released preliminary
results from its Stanford Study of Writing, which exam-
ined in-class and out-of-class writing samples from
thousands of students over five years. One of the study’s
lead researchers, Andrea Lunsford, concluded, “We’re in
the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we
haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” The source of this
revolution, Lunsford proposed, is the “life writing” stu-
dents do every day online: The study found that 38 per-
cent of their writing occurred outside the classroom.
But as Emory University English professor Mark
Bauerlein pointed out in a blog post on The Chronicle of
Higher Education’s Web site, this so-called revolution has
not translated into concrete improvements in writing
skills as measured by standardized tests such as the ACT;
nor has it led to a reduction in the number of remedial
writing courses necessary to prepare students for the
workplace. Of greater concern was the attitude students
expressed about the usefulness of writing: Most of them
judged the quality of writing by the size of the audience
that read it rather than its ability to convey ideas. One of

the most prolific contributors to the study, a Stanford
undergraduate who submitted more than 700 writing
samples ranging from Facebook messages to short stories,
told the Chronicle that for him a class writing assignment
was a “soulless exercise” because it had an audience of one,
the professor. He and other students in the study, raised
on the Internet, consistently expressed a preference for
writing that garnered the most attention from as many
people as possible.
O
ur need for stories to translate our experience
hasn’t changed. Our ability to be deeply
engaged readers of those stories is chang-
ing. For at least half a century, the image culture has
trained us to expect the easily digestible, the quickly
paced, and the uncomplicated. As our tolerance for the
inconvenient or complex fades, images achieve even
more prominence, displacing the word by appealing
powerfully to a different kind of emotional sensibility,
one whose vividness and urgency are undeniable but
whose ability to explore nuance are not the same as
that of the printed word.
What Boorstin feared—that a society beholden to
the image would cease to distinguish the real from the
unreal—has not come to pass. On the contrary, we
acknowledge the unique characteristics of the virtual
world and have eagerly embraced them, albeit uncrit-
ically. But Boorstin’s other concern—that a culture
that craves the image will eventually find itself mired
in solipsism and satisfied by secondhand experi-
ences—has been borne out. We follow the Twitter
feeds of protesting Iranians and watch video of
Michael Jackson’s funeral and feel connected to the

rest of the world, even though we lack context for
that feeling and don’t make much effort to achieve it
beyond logging on. The screen offers us the illusion of
participation, and this illusion is becoming our pref- avid reader
can recall the book that first unlocked the
erence. As Boorstin observed, “Every day seeing there door of
his imagination or provided a sense of escape
and hearing there takes the place of being there.” from the
everyday world. The critic Harold Bloom has
This secondhand experience is qualitatively different written
that he was forever changed by his early encoun-
from the empathy we develop as readers. “We read to ters with
books: “My older sisters, when I was very
know we are not alone,” C. S. Lewis once observed, and young,
took me to the library, and thus transformed my
by this he meant that
books are a gateway to a
better understanding of
what it means to be
human. Because the pace is
slower and the rewards
delayed, the exercise of
reading on the printed
page requires a commit-
ment unlike that de-
manded by the screen, as
anyone who has embarked
on the journey of an ambitiously long novel can attest. life.” As
Maryanne Wolf notes, “Biologically and intel-
What the screen gives us is pleasurable, but it is not the

lectually, reading allows the species to go ‘beyond the
same kind of experience as deeply engaged reading; the
information given’ to create endless thoughts most beau-
“screen literacy” praised by techno-enthusiasts should be tiful
and wonderful.”
seen as a complement to, not a replacement of, tradi- The
proliferation of image and text on the Internet
tional literacy. has exacerbated the solipsism Boorstin feared,
because
Since the migration of the word from page to screen it allows us
to read in a broad but shallow manner. It
is still in its early stages, predictions about the future of
endorses rather than challenges our sensibilities, and
print are hazardous at best. When Time magazine substitutes
synthetic images for our own peculiar form
named “YOU!” its person of the year in 2006, the choice of
imagination. Over time, the ephemeral, immediate
was meant as a celebratory recognition of our new dig- quality
of this constant stream of images undermines the
ital world and its many opportunities for self-expression. self-
control required to engage with the written word.
We are all writers now, crafters of our own images and And so
we find ourselves in the position of living in a
creators of our own online worlds. But so far this power highly
literate society that chooses not to exercise the
has made us less, not more, willing to submit ourselves
privilege of literacy—indeed, it no longer views literacy
to the singular visions of writers and artists and to learn as a
privilege at all.
from them difficult truths about the human condition. In Essays
on His Own Times (1850), Samuel Tay-
It has encouraged us to substitute images and simplis- lor
Coleridge observed, “The great majority of men
tic snippets of text for the range, precision, and peculiar live
like bats, but in twilight, and know and feel the

beauty of written language, with its unique power to philosophy
of their age only by its reflections and
express complex and abstract ideas. Recent surveys by
refractions.” Today we know our age by its tweets
the National Endowment for the Arts reveal that fewer and text
messages, its never-ending litany of online
Americans read literature for pleasure than in the past; posts
and ripostes. Judging by the evidence so far, the
writers of serious fiction face a daunting publishing content we
find the most compelling is what we pro-
market and a reading public that has come to prefer the duce
about ourselves: our tastes, opinions, and habits.
celebrity memoir to the new literary novel. This has made us
better interpreters of our own expe-
There is a reason that the metaphor so often invoked rience, but
it has not made us better readers or more
to describe the experience of reading is one of escape: An
empathetic human beings. ■
provided a sense of escape from the
AN AVID READER can recall the book
that first unlocked his imagination or
everyday world.
T hree Twee ts

for the Web
Welcome the new world with open arms—and browsers.
B Y T Y L E R C O W E N
The printed word is not dead. We are not
about to see the demise of the novel or the shuttering
of all the bookstores, and we won’t all end up on
Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of a cultural
transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is
more likely to provide a formative cultural experience
than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the
Harry Potter novels. There is no question that books
are becoming less central to our cultural life.
The relative decline of the book is part of a broader
shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural
bits—written words, music, video—have never been
easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus
they are a growing part of our enjoyment and educa-
tion. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to
the iTunes single. On YouTube, the most popular
videos are usually just a few minutes long, and even
then viewers may not watch them through to the
end. At the extreme, there are Web sites offering five-
word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs
(“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-word wine
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason
Univer-
sity. This essay is adapted from his new book, Create Your Own
Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. He
blogs at
www.marginalrevolution.com, and can be followed on Twitter

at
tylercowen.
reviews, and 50-word minisagas.*
The new brevity has many virtues. One appeal of fol-
lowing blogs is the expectation of receiving a new reward
(and finishing off that reward) every day. Blogs feature
everything from expert commentary on politics or graphic
design to reviews of new Cuban music CDs to casual
ruminations on feeding one’s cat. Whatever the subject, the
content is replenished on a periodic basis, much as 19th-
century novels were often delivered in installments, but at
a faster pace and with far more authors and topics to
choose from. In the realm of culture, a lot of our enjoyment
has always come from the opening and unwrapping of
each gift. Thanks to today’s hypercurrent online environ-
ment, this is a pleasure we can experience nearly
constantly.
It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish
attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as
gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit
*Not everything is shorter and more to the point. The same
modern wealth
that encourages a proliferation of choices also enables very long
perform-
ances and spectacles. In the German town of Halberstadt, a
specially built
organ is playing the world’s longest concert ever, designed to
clock in at 639
years. This is also the age of complete boxed sets, DVD
collector’s editions,

extended “director’s cut” versions of movies, and the eight- or
sometimes
even 10-year Ph.D. But while there is an increasing diversity of
length,
shorter is the trend. How many of us have an interest in hearing
more than
a brief excerpt from the world’s longest concert?
is making human minds more rather
than less powerful.
The arrival of virtually every new
cultural medium has been greeted with
the charge that it truncates attention
spans and represents the beginning of
cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th
century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll,
television, and now the Web. In fact,
there has never been a golden age of all-
wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s
not to say that nothing has changed.
The mass migration of intellectual
activity from print to the Web has
brought one important development:
We have begun paying more attention
to information. Overall, that’s a big plus
for the new world order.
It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia
as information overload. We’ve all seen
people scrolling with one hand through
a BlackBerry while pecking out instant
messages (IMs) on a laptop with the
other and eyeing a television (I won’t

say “watching”). But even though it is
easy to see signs of overload in our busy
lives, the reality is that most of us care-
fully regulate this massive inflow of
information to create something
uniquely suited to our particular inter-
ests and needs—a rich and highly per-
sonalized blend of cultural gleanings. Twitter allows the author
to instantly “tweet” some 2,000 “followers.”
The word for this process is multi-
tasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the
place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls
out a steady stream of information from disparate sources
to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your
topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll
tailor an information stream related to the continuing “sto-
ries” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health
care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With
the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narra-
tives about the world. The apparent disorder of the infor-
mation stream reflects not your incoherence but rather
your depth and originality as an individual.
My own daily cultural harvest usually involves listen-
ing to music and reading—novels, nonfiction, and Web
essays—with periodic glances at the New York Times Web
site and an e-mail check every five minutes or so. Often I
actively don’t want to pull apart these distinct activities and
focus on them one at a time for extended periods. I like the

blend I assemble for myself, and I like what I learn from If you
use Google to look something up in 10 seconds
it. To me (and probably no one else, but that is the point), rather
than spend five minutes searching through an
the blend offers the ultimate in interest and suspense. Call
encyclopedia, that doesn’t mean you are less patient. It
me an addict, but if I am torn away from these stories for means
you are creating more time to focus on other
even a day, I am very keen to get back for the next “episode.”
matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever
before to big-picture questions, from the nature of God
to the best age for marrying and the future of the U.S.
M
any critics charge that multitasking makes us economy.
less efficient. Researchers say that periodi-
Our focus on cultural bits doesn’t mean we are
cally checking your e-mail lowers your cog- neglecting the
larger picture. Rather, those bits are
nitive performance level to that of a drunk. If such building-
blocks for seeing and understanding larger
claims were broadly correct, multitasking would pretty trends
and narratives. The typical Web user doesn’t visit
a gardening blog one day
and a Manolo Blahnik
shoes blog the next day,
and never return to either.
Most activity online, or at
least the kind that persists,
involves continuing invest-

ments in particular long-
running narratives—about
gardening, art, shoes, or
whatever else engages us.
There’s an alluring sus-
rapidly disappear simply because people would find pense to it.
What’s next? That is why the Internet cap-
that it didn’t make sense to do it. Multitasking is flour- tures so
much of our attention.
ishing, and so are we. There are plenty of lab experiments
Indeed, far from shortening our attention spans, the
that show that distracting people reduces the capacity of Web
lengthens them by allowing us to follow the same
their working memory and thus impairs their decision story over
many years’ time. If I want to know what’s new
making. It’s much harder to show that multitasking, with the
NBA free-agent market, the debate surround-
when it results from the choices and control of an indi- ing
global warming, or the publication plans of Thomas
vidual, does anyone cognitive harm. Multitasking is not
Pynchon, Google quickly gets me to the most current
a distraction from our main activity, it is our main information.
Formerly I needed personal contacts—
activity. people who were directly involved in the action—to
fol-
Consider the fact that IQ scores have been rising for low a story
for years, but now I can do it quite easily.
decades, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. I Sometimes
it does appear I am impatient. I’ll discard
won’t argue that multitasking is driving this improve- a half-
read book that 20 years ago I might have finished.
ment, but the Flynn effect does belie the common But once I put
down the book, I will likely turn my
impression that people are getting dumber or less atten-

attention to one of the long-running stories I follow
tive. A harried multitasking society seems perfectly com-
online. I’ve been listening to the music of Paul McCart-
patible with lots of innovation, lots of high achievers, and ney
for more than 30 years, for example, and if there is
lots of high IQ scores. some new piece of music or development
in his career,
With the help of technology, we are honing our abil- I see it
first on the Internet. If our Web surfing is some-
ity to do many more things at once and do them faster. times
frantic or pulled in many directions, that is because
We access and absorb information more quickly than we care so
much about so many long-running stories. It
before, and, as a result, we often seem more impatient. could be
said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient
TECHNOL OGY IS HONING our ability to
do many more things at once and to do
them faster. Multitasking may even be
making us smarter.
to return to our chosen programs of patience.
Another way the Web has affected the human atten-
tion span is by allowing greater specialization of knowl-
edge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a
long-term intellectual project without at the same time
losing touch with the world around you. Some critics

don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is
destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us
to follow only the specialized stories that pique our indi-
vidual interests. But there are also those who argue that
the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an
endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper
pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms
contradict each other. The reality is that
the Internet both aids in knowledge
specialization and helps specialists
keep in touch with general trends.
The key to developing your per-
sonal blend of all the “stuff ”
that’s out there is to use
the right tools. The quan-
tity of information coming
our way has exploded,
but so has the quality of
our filters, including
Google, blogs, and Twit-
ter. As Internet analyst
Clay Shirky points out,
there is no information over-
load, only filter failure. If you wish,
you can keep all the information
almost entirely at bay and use Google or
text a friend only when you need to know
cially may lack the intellectual framework needed to
integrate all the incoming bits into a meaningful whole.
A lot of people are on the Web just to have fun or to
achieve some pretty straightforward personal goals—
they may want to know what happened to their former

high school classmates or the history of the dachshund.
“It’s still better than watching TV” is certainly a sufficient
defense of these practices, but there is a deeper point:
The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life.
The Web’s heralded interactivity not only furthers that
process but opens up new possibilities for more discus-
sion and debate. Anyone can find space on the Inter-
net to rate a product, criticize an idea, or review a
new movie or book.
One way to understand the emo-
tional and intellectual satis-
factions of the new world is
by way of contrast. Consider
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.
The music and libretto
express a gamut of human
emotions, from terror to
humor to love to the sublime.
With its ability to combine so
much in a single work of art,
the opera represents a great
achievement of the Western
canon. But, for all Don Gio-
vanni’s virtues, it takes well
over three hours to hear it in
its entirety, perhaps four with
an intermission. Plus, the
libretto is in Italian. And if
Multitasking is bliss.

something. That’s not usually how it works. Many of us
are cramming ourselves with Web experiences—videos,
online chats, magazines—and also fielding a steady
stream of incoming e-mails, text messages, and IMs. The
resulting sense of time pressure is not a pathology; it is
a reflection of the appeal and intensity of what we are
doing. The Web allows you to enhance the meaning
and importance of the cultural bits at your disposal;
thus you want to grab more of them, and organize more
of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task,
even if it means you sometimes feel harried.
It’s true that many people on the Web are not look-
ing for a cerebral experience, and younger people espe-
you want to see the performance live, a good seat can cost
hundreds of dollars.
Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don
Giovanni in one long, expensive sitting, on the Web we
pick the moods we want from disparate sources and
assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube,
a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a
melody from iTunes, and some images—perhaps our
own digital photos—capturing the sublime beauty of the
Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks very impres-
sive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is
a rich and varied inner experience. The new wonders we
create are simply harder for outsiders to see than, say, the

fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.
The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether
you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but
whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-
related technologies. One thing you can do with such
devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can
see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s
not so much about having information as it is about
knowing how to get it. Viewed in this light, today’s young
people are very culturally literate indeed—in fact, they
are very often cultural leaders and creators.
T
o better understand contemporary culture,
consider an analogy to romance. Although
many long-distance relationships survive,
they are difficult to sustain. When you have to travel
far to meet your beloved, you want to make every trip
a grand and glorious occasion. Usually you don’t fly
from one coast to another just to hang out and share
downtime and small talk. You go out to eat and to the
theater, you make passionate love, and you have
intense conversations. You have a lot of thrills, but it’s
hard to make it work because in the long run it’s
casually spending time together and the routines of
daily life that bind two people to each other. And of
course, in a long-distance relationship, a lot of the
time you’re not together at all. If you really love the
other person you’re not consistently happy, even
though your peak experiences may be amazing.
A long-distance relationship is, in emotional
terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or

Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at
least compared to modern times. When you did
arrive, the performance was often very exciting and
indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you
didn’t have that much culture at all. Even books were
expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is pos-
sible in modern life, you couldn’t be as happy overall
but your peak experiences could be extremely mem-
orable, just as in the long-distance relationship.
Now let’s consider how living together and marriage
differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share
a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your
partner is usually right there. Most days include no
grand events, but you have lots of regular and pre-
dictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or
even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship.
There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed,
maybe diapers to be changed.
If you are happily married, or even somewhat
happily married, your internal life will be very rich.
You will take all those small events and, in your mind
and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together
in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty dia-
pers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the out-
side, but the internal experience of such a marriage
is better than what’s normally possible in a long-
distance relationship.
The same logic applies to culture. The Internet
and other technologies mean that our favorite cre-
ators, or at least their creations, are literally part of

our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance rela-
tionship. It is no longer hard to get books and other
written material. Pictures, music, and video appear
on command. Culture is there all the time, and you
can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you
want.
In short, our relationship to culture has become
more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our
lives in an established flow, creating a better and
more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in
some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear
so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how
we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is
more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of
far more people. That is why the public devours new
technologies that offer extreme and immediate access
to information.
Many critics of contemporary life want our culture
to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time
when most of us are growing into something more
mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating
and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade.
Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to
this new endeavor; it’s just another cultural bit we
consume along with many others. But we are better
off for this change, a change that is filling our daily
lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.
Or if you’d like the shorter version to post to your
Twitter account (140 characters or less): “Smart people
are doing wonderful things.” ■

T he Battle of
the Books
In the long history of the book, the mass-produced volumes of
our
time constitute only a single chapter. More remain to be written.
B Y A L E X W R I G H T
In 1704, Jonathan Swift imagined a literary
contest for the ages, in the form of a “battle of the books”
between the Ancients and the Moderns in the royal library
at St. James, where the works of Aristotle, Virgil, and other
classical giants were struggling to maintain their place on
the shelves against a barbarous onslaught of new books,
pamphlets, journals, and other literary ephemera. Almost
300 years before the first Web browser appeared, Swift
seems to have anticipated the age of information overload.
Imagine what Swift might have made of our present
era, when every year human beings disgorge an amount
of data equivalent to more than 30,000 times the con-
tents of the Library of Congress? Perhaps the closest
corollary to Swift’s heroic Ancients today may be our old
ink-on-paper books, those time-honored relics whose
cultural supremacy now seems under siege by a binary
blitzkrieg of blogs, tweets, social networks, and other
emerging forms of digital dross.
Scarcely a day goes by without some writer or other
penning a wistful rumination on the decline of books in
the digital age. The usual culprits include all things
Alex Wright is a writer and researcher at The New York Times

and is
the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
(2007).
Internet, of course, but also the consolidation of the
publishing industry, the decline of modestly selling
midlist books in favor of blockbusters, the shuttering of
newspaper book review sections, and so on. Whatever
the causes and conditions, one fact seems clear enough:
Books are on the decline.
From 2007 to 2008, the number of U.S. book titles
fell by three percent, to 275,232. While that scarcely
qualifies as a Detroit-scale meltdown, it nonetheless
represents a painful contraction for an industry that
has historically operated on paper-thin profit margins.
So it should come as no surprise that the Web has ush-
ered in wave upon wave of literary hand-wringing.
Almost invariably, the defenders of the book invoke
a passing golden age that dates back to Johannes Guten-
berg’s invention of moveable type. The conventional
narrative goes something like this: Before Gutenberg,
books were locked away in the monasteries, available
only to the educated few; after Gutenberg, printed
books—liberated from the confines of the monastic
scriptoria—spread like wildfire across Europe, the Age
of Reason dawned, and there followed a halcyon era of
literary harmony.

Alas, like many “golden ages,” the golden age of books
turns out be an oversimplified historical conceit. Books
as we know them today—mass-produced popular liter-
ature in the form of novels, nonfiction, and other “trade”
publications—certainly owe a debt to Gutenberg, but
they may owe even more to the Industrial Revolution,
during which a confluence of social, economic, and tech-
nological change created the conditions that gave rise to
the modern book trade. And just as 19th- and 20th-cen-
tury books took shape in the crucible of industrialization,
so their 21st-century descendants are starting to reflect
a long-term historical shift away from the manufactur-
ing economy and toward a postindustrial society. We are
entering the age of the postindustrial book.
U
ntil the early 19th century, producing a book
remained a costly proposition—less costly
than generating an illuminated manuscript
by hand, to be sure, but far more costly than, say, pub-
lishing a dime novel. Books were typically printed one
sheet at a time on corkscrew presses that had barely
changed in the 400 years since Gutenberg was alive;
then they were carefully folded into quartos and
octavos, stitched together, and bound by hand. While
a handful of books—such as the Bible—received wide-
spread distribution, most were published in small
batches. Often, a wealthy book buyer contracted with
a printer to buy the pages of a book, then have the
pages bound by a professional binder in a custom
cover that would signal the buyer’s social standing.
For many buyers, books served as status objects as
much as they did vehicles for personal enlightenment.
The age of the modern book began in 1810, when

a German inventor named Friedrich Koenig patented
a steam-powered press that for the first time could
create a printed page through mechanical means. In
1833, the American engineer Richard Hoe improved
on Koenig’s machine with a rotary press that could
turn out millions of pages in a single day, helping to
spawn the penny press that dominated American
journalism for much of the 19th century. A Victorian
information explosion was under way.
By the middle of the century, books, magazines,
pamphlets, and all manner of printed artifacts were
sluicing through the literary mills, as publishers
turned out new literary products at an astonishing
rate. Popular novels, how-to books, cookbooks, pam-
phlets, and modern textbooks all came into their
own during this period thanks to the economics of
mass production.
In 1800, the library of the British Museum (pre-
cursor to the modern British Library) held 48,000
volumes. By 1833 the collection had quintupled, to
more than a quarter-million. By 1900, it had sur-
passed four million (still a far cry from the 150 mil-
lion items in today’s collection).
Thomas Carlyle, then probably the most famous
writer in England, railed against the rapid prolifera-
tion of cheap literature. He detested the populariza-
tion of literature, which libraries were accumulating
with an “eye to the prurient appetite of the great mil-
lion, [furnishing] them with any kind of garbage
they will have. The result is melancholy—making

bad worse—for every bad book begets an appetite for
reading a worse one.”
Carlyle’s complaint hardly seems out of place
today. But from this great literary effluvia emerged
some of the jewels of European literature. Charles
Dickens, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, and
other popular writers of the day might never have
found their audiences if not for the advances of the
industrial age. Yet this was also the age that gave rise
to cheap, mass-produced pornography, “penny dread-
fuls” (such as Sweeney Todd), and thousands of for-
gotten pulp novels.
How did industrialization shape the modern book?
First, the technologies of mass production meant that
texts could be standardized. Whereas at one time
small publishers had turned out books in modest runs
for scholars and bourgeois readers, now the econom-
ics of production demanded a more market-driven
sensibility. Books no longer went from author to
printer to buyer. Now they had to move through the
stages of industrial production: acquisition of raw
materials, manufacturing, marketing, distribution,
and sales. The growth of the book industry thus
spawned a vast literary supply chain in the form of lit-
erary agents, publishing houses, libraries, public
schools, scholarly societies—an interlocking system of
institutional gatekeepers that would control the pro-
duction of literary capital for the next 150 years.
Will the book endure? That’s a question of definition.

Today, the industrial model of publishing is under-
going a rapid reconfiguration. In a world where any-
one can publish freely—and millions do—the old
supply chain is coming undone, as publishers see
both their economic power and their cultural author-
ity erode. Institutional gatekeepers are giving ground
to bottom-up, self-organizing networks of readers
and writers.
While the Internet has a great deal to do with
these changes, it may be instructive to take a deeper
look at the historical forces at work. In 1974 Daniel
Bell predicted the rise of the postindustrial society,
correctly forecasting the decline of the manufactur-
ing sector and the rise of a service-based economy.
Francis Fukuyama has since argued that this era
might more accurately be dubbed the information
society, as individuals begin to take advantage of new
information technologies to renegotiate their rela-
tionships with institutions. Trust in institutions has
steadily eroded in recent decades; meanwhile, new
technologies are providing consumers with the means
to create and remix their own cultural artifacts.
As the means of production pass into consumers’
hands, book buyers are demanding more control over
what they read and how they read it. Just as the

music industry has seen a rapid disruption of its sup-
ply chain as listeners increasingly bypass record com-
panies to interact with musicians and with other fans
over the Web—streaming music and sharing files—so
readers can now exercise unprecedented control over
their choice of reading materials and delivery
mechanisms.
While the removal of gatekeepers may create a
short-term boon for consumers, the rapid disrup-
tion of a long-established economic system is wreak-
ing havoc with the livelihoods of those who depend on
the old ways of doing business, such as editors, liter-
ary agents, and pressmen. Meanwhile, the creators—
musicians, writers, and artists—have started search-
ing for new revenue sources in the online economy.
This is not to say that ink-on-paper books are
about to disappear. Last year, even as the total num-
ber of books sold declined, the number of print-on-
demand titles—books stored electronically and com-
mitted to paper on an as-needed basis in small batch
runs or even just one by one—more than doubled
from the year before, to 285,394. Textbook publish-
ers, for example, now produce custom editions for
individual school districts to support local permuta-
tions of educational standards. And the growth of
public-domain literary repositories such as Project
Gutenberg, a long-running volunteer initiative that
has digitized more than 30,000 out-of-copyright
books, has made vast swaths of classic literature freely
available to anyone with a Web browser and a printer.
The Web has also given would-be authors a direct
pipeline to industrial-scale printing technology,

thanks to self-publishing services such as XLibris,
Lulu, Blurb, and iUniverse. Using these services, any-
one with a credit card can publish a professional-
looking book with custom layouts, typefaces, color
printing, dust jackets, cover blurbs, ISBN numbers,
and even an order page on Amazon.com, where
authors can peddle their newly minted books in
In the 19th century, the invention of the mechanical printing
press revolutionized publishing. Men feed paper into a 10-
cylinder revolving
newspaper press, conceived by engineer Richard Hoe, in this
1847 engraving.
printed form or offer a Kindle download—all without scramble
to stay afloat, untold thousands of readers
the intervention of agents, editors, or publicists. and writers are
finding new ways to negotiate their
The book, then, is becoming less of a fixed indus- relationships
with books.
trial commodity and more of a fluid entity on the net- For
decades, the major publishers functioned some-
work, capable of flowing into any number of vessels— thing
like the big car companies, turning out the liter-
paper, Web browsers, eBooks, iPhones—depending ary
equivalent of production-line products. Sure, there
on a particular confluence of author, reader, and were products
targeted at particular market segments
technology. (Ford Escorts and Stephen King for the masses,

Volvo
Given these permutating platforms, it’s natural to wagons and
Joyce Carol Oates for the MFA set), but by
wonder at what point a book is no longer, well, a book. and
large they relied on the old industrial model of
The U.S. Postal Service
defines a book as a “bound
publication having 24 or
more pages, at least 22 of
which are printed and
contain primary reading
material, with advertising
limited only to book
announcements.” What,
then, of a book purchased
on a Kindle, which doesn’t count pages, but only
manufacturing, marketing, sales, and distribution.
words? Or an out-of-print title found on Google Books, Now we
live in an era when the old model is coming
accompanied by keyword advertising in a corner of the
unhinged and the product lines are contracting (GM
screen? What of the Buffy the Vampire aficionados scrapping
its underperforming brands, publishers par-
who upload their fan fiction to the Buffy Fiction ing their
midlists to focus on a dwindling number of
Archive (http://archive.shriftweb.org)? Perhaps our bestsellers)
as consumers exert more choice in a post-
definition of what constitutes a “book” needs to evolve.
E
industrial economy.
Even traditional mass-produced books now come
to market in an increasingly open, networked envi-

ven as the book’s technological underpin- ronment where their
fates are determined not by
nings shift, however, the book itself still newspaper reviewers
alone, but also by the collective
seems to take shape in readers’ minds as a judgment of readers
on Amazon and social network-
kind of platonic object, regardless of the delivery ing sites such
as GoodReads, LibraryThing, and Shel-
mechanism. In other words, it is more than just a fari, where
visitors upload and share lists of books in
string of text. There is a kind of “thingness” to it (to their
libraries, post reviews and ratings, and find
borrow a term from a colleague, New York Times like-minded
readers, all in a vast Borgesian labyrinth
design director Tom Bodkin). Thingness means more of visible
hyperlinks.
than physical solidity; it implies a certain fixity of As the Web
continues to evolve, spurring the transi-
time, space, and meaning—a stable reference point in tion from
mass-market economies of scale to bottom-up
an increasingly ephemeral world of electronic texts. networks of
interlinked communities, so the book is
As more and more data get lost in the great miasma changing
from a fixed unit of commerce into a virtual
of the Web, readers may come to assign growing marker of
social capital. Book authors can now measure
value to the comforting virtues of thingness. their success not
just in terms of royalties, but also in
That value may not always translate into hard terms of Google
PageRank, Twitter followers, blog traf-
sales, however. Even as publishers, clinging desper- fic, and
other forms of attention that not only boost
ately to the old industrial model of mass production, their egos
but in some cases lead indirectly to monetary

THE BOOK IS BECOMING a fluid entity
that can flow into any number of vessels—
paper, Web browsers, eBooks, or iPhones.
compensation (such as invitations to speak at confer-
ences). In his 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow coined
the term “whuffie,” an imaginary currency based on rep-
utation. In the postindustrial economy, whuffie is the
coin of the realm.
Whuffie alone doesn’t pay the bills—as any work-
ing author can attest—but the virtual currency of
attention and reputation can nonetheless translate
into real money: Nonfiction authors who master the
art of online self-promotion may parlay their whuffie
into speaking fees, consulting gigs, and other forms
of paying work. Successful fiction writers, mean-
while, often supplement their dwindling publishers’
advances by accepting teaching positions in the
booming market for MFA programs and writing
workshops. For many writers, the book is more than
just their “product”; it is becoming a totem of accom-
plishment, a form of social capital that gains its cre-
ator entrée to other opportunities.
S

o will the old dust-jacketed hardcover give way
to a virtual facsimile, traded in an ephemeral
economy of attention? Not entirely, at least not
anytime soon. Some 275,000 titles in print form are
unlikely to disappear overnight. But alongside them,
a new kind of book is likely to emerge: a unit of intel-
lectual capital that develops from the bottom up,
through a dialogue between readers and writers, one
that can take physical or electronic form but doesn’t
necessarily require the intervention of a traditional
publishing company. While that object may some-
times differ in form from the traditional bound vol-
ume we know today, it will still embody the virtues of
thingness.
Fans of the sci-fi writer Jack Vance recently
banded together over the Internet to create the Vance
Integral Edition, a 45-volume compendium of the
writer’s works, accompanied by a Web site dubbed
Totality (pharesm.org) that serves as a virtual con-
cordance to his published works. Here, a self-
organizing community of readers coalesced into a
network that was able to accomplish a literary feat
bridging virtual and physical texts, creating a prod-
uct that likely never would have found its way to
market through traditional publishing channels. And
while a self-organizing network of fans with Web
browsers will never produce the same kind of work as
a solitary author, in this case the network comple-
mented the work of the individual, creating a virtu-
ous circle of literary productivity.

As the Web matures, we will continue to see
new models of production emerge, so that over
time the distinction between physical and virtual
bookmaking may start to blur. And we may yet see a
kind of reconciliation between online and offline
reading experiences, in which even electronic books
start to find new forms of expression in the physical
world. The Kindle and other e-readers may mark the
first steps toward a new kind of literary object that
combines the physicality of the printed book with
the lightweight efficiencies of software. When that
happens, entirely new literary forms will appear, as
the boundaries between one book and another start
to shift.
There have been several occasions in our history
when a new information technology transformed the
intellectual landscape: the advent of alphabetic writ-
ing, the papyrus scroll, the codex book, and the print-
ing press, to name a few. In each case, the full effects
of the technology took centuries to unfold. A hundred
years after Gutenberg, only a relative handful of peo-
ple had seen a printed book. Yet a mere 20 years
after Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, more than
a billion people have used a Web browser.
While it may be too early to make long-term pre-
dictions about the Web’s effect on our social, intel-
lectual, and economic landscapes, it hardly seems
like an understatement to suggest that we are wit-
nessing the dawn of an epochal transformation. None
of us know how any of this will turn out. But perhaps
it’s useful to reflect, in closing, on what drew us to
books in the first place. There seems to be a particu-
lar kind of anxiety that brings readers and writers
together on the page, a need to find a shared point of

understanding in an uncertain world. In an age of
technological transformation, that anxiety is likely to
grow. And so our impulse to read and write books—
in whatever form they may take—will only intensify.
As Swift put it, “A restless spirit haunts over every
book.” ■
To the Editor:
Critics of digital text insist that we read differently when we
read on line, scanning,
skimming, jumping hyperactively from link to link in contrast
to the deliberate, reflective
practice that paper demands. Attention must be paid, they claim,
but the sensory overload
of the internet gives us all attention deficit.
But plenty of offline texts are also designed to be read, not
linearly like a novel, but in fits
and starts: our desultory reading of newspapers, encyclopedias,
phone books, catalogues,
cookbooks, and reports is a function of the genre, not the
medium. The common practice
of moving back and forth within any text on pages or on screens
suggests that reading
from beginning to middle to end is but one kind of reading,
regardless of the technology
encoding the words.
As for extended works of narrative and expository prose, while
more of us are porting our
reading from page to laptop, Kindle, or big-screen mobile
phone, many readers still
prefer them on the page, not because pages promote meditation

instead of ADD, but
because at least for now, books are more convenient than
screens, and involve less eye
strain.
If scare headlines that we’re reading fewer books are true (and
given that books didn’t
become big business until the mid-19th century, it’s not clear
that “we” ever read a lot of
books to begin with), that’s not the fault of either the old or the
new technologies. Nor is
it caused by some postmodern inability to focus. The decline in
books may simply be due
to the fact that books aren’t doing what they need to do to hold
their market share.
Still, computers don’t seem poised to replace books any more
than they’re replacing
pencils. Although we may posit a battle of the books, the two
technologies are not at war,
so maybe as social activists say, we should just get over it, and
get on with our reading.
Dennis Baron
battlebks.pdfwilson3wilson2wilson1baronwq

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