Norm Geras, displaying the unfailing common sense to which his readers have become accustomed, suggests the obvious for those who worry that the internet is ruining their book habit:
Me, I don’t get it. It’s true that sometimes, if you have to switch rapidly from one type of activity to another, there can be a problem. For example, if you’ve been in charge of boisterous young children for some hours, and have to sit down immediately to something requiring intense mental concentration, you may find that you’d be better placed coming to it after a break. Switching from much online hopping and skipping about to serious reading is no different. The problem isn’t with the internet. And the solution is straightforward. Here’s one version of it: however much of your spare time you spend online, spend at least 50 percent of that reading (books and such). You’ll find you can do it just as well as ever. This is if you want to. And if you don’t, then you don’t. But that’s you, in that case, and not the internet. [e.a.]
Geras was responding to the hand-wringing of this guy.
The number of links I’d have to provide for previous hues and cries about the death of books and reading would fill all the space that WordPress offers, so I won’t even try. I have written about the supposed death of reading before, though: here.
[updated (twice) with some missing links]
As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.
But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).
Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.
Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).
Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.
So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***
[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.
For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.
And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:
If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.
So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)
Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).
Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:
Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
Here:
[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]
And here:
[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:
For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.
But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.
It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:
something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.
New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:
Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.
“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”
The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.
For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:
Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.
And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]
Interesting times indeed.
update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.
Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.”
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*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)
Have you ever read something that was not written by you but that could have been? I just did. Here’s Jane Galt:
I read fast. Really fast. … I have never taken a speed reading course, and never tried to learn how to read fast; I’ve been doing it . . . well, I don’t know how long, but at least since I was in junior high school. The only tricks I know for learning how to read fast are:
1) Be born to parents who read fast, and a lot 2) Read a lot yourself when you are a child
As I get older, though, I’ve figured out how I do it: I skip things. This may seem obvious, but I actually had to catch myself doing it; it is not a conscious process, and if I think about it, I can’t do it. Somehow, my brain selects chunks of text that it thinks won’t convey new information, and avoids them. Perhaps this is not optimal, but it works well enough for me to have made A’s in most of my college lit classes. [I didn't take many college lit classes ---ed.] I can still read faster than most people while reading completely, and I do for some things, like textbooks, but it takes effort and I don’t enjoy it as much.
What brought this on was Tyler Cowen’s post on How to read fast
Galt thinks that most bloggers read fast (and describes someone witnessing Glenn Reynolds’s awesome speed-reading***). She’s probably right about that.
It’s only logical. I blog daily, and I consume (”read”) a whole lot in order to be able to produce, on average, four content- and link-rich posts a day. I won’t begin to guess the ratio (do I consume ten times as much as I produce? five times?). The point is that I need to be able to “read” fast in order to produce that much.
I’d argue, though, that when I’m reading at my fastest, I’m not reading “completely,” as Galt says she does when she reads five or six pages a minute. Not even close. The faster I read, the more often I have to backtrack in order to comprehend what I’m reading. The “searching for keywords” process that allows fast readers to hurtle through a text doesn’t really allow for complete processing. Not in my experience, at least.
Galt continues:
The interesting thing is that while I read a lot, I also re-read a lot, mostly fiction. For good books, I find each reading a deeper experience; it now occurs to me that this is because I’m reading a slightly different group of paragraphs than I did the previous time. My friends who read slowly, never reread.
I re-read a lot, too. I re-read constantly, in fact—as I’m reading. I’m forced to, because oftentimes there’s a lot riding on my getting what I read. Close reading (for nuance, for deep meaning, for shades of difference) requires you to slow down.
My “slow” is probably faster than what some people would consider “fast,” but there’s no virtue in this for me. I have family members who read slowly. They remember and treasure every word they read in the books they loved. Like Jane Galt, I re-read a lot of fiction, too. I have to, because there’s a lot I just don’t remember from the first time around…because I skipped over it.
That’s why, like Galt,
I have a pretty remarkable gift for forgetting whodunnit; I can read them every five years, and never see it coming.
I dunno. I can’t quite come around to thinking that this is a good thing.
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*** The prodigious Reynolds is, obviously, Mr. Incredible.
