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Doing the Internet Shuffle

JA November 06

A while ago, David Ulin, book editor of the LA Times, wrote about the ongoing impact of internet culture on his reading habits.

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, primarily at night – a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down.

This type of anxiety – that our constant consumption of fast, bite-sized digital information is steadily eating away at our attention spans – is well worn. Overland held an interesting discussion about this on its blog a few months back, and more recently Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation as well as the folk over at About Last Night also weighed in. The responses seem to indicate that the majority of readers are noticing these side effects to one degree or another. Terry from ALN had this to say:

The other night as I was reading, I noticed my eyes were shifting up and down the page, instead of left to right, a sign that I read more on a monitor most days than on a page, but also a symptom that I was out of condition for any sort of complicated sentence: ‘Where's your kicker, Henry James? Your bullets? Your boldfaced exclamations?’

On this issue, I’m divided. Like Jeff, I don’t want to pin the blame solely on the internet (modern life, in general, moves ten times faster than the days of yesteryear) and, equally, I don’t want to bemoan the loss of some ‘golden age’ of reading (the internet too can drive the engine for a new kind of literacy). But I can’t deny that the constant stream of information and diversions – RSS feeds, pop-up boxes, email alerts, Twitter, Facebook and co, all demanding read me first and read me now – has had a huge impact on not only on the way I read, but also the way I write.

When it comes to books, I often find that a novel has to work that much harder to grab me and make me invest time and energy in it. However, I can still manage to while away hours with the right book. At least then, I’m physically away from the computer, and so less tempted to open a browser and begin surfing. A bigger problem arises when it comes to writing. I’m hopeless at sketching out ideas by hand and always work off a laptop. Unfortunately, when it comes to procrastination, the net is the great provider and I can’t even add up the number of hours I probably waste checking Twitter, blogs and newsfeeds. When Spike ran a comp on daily routines a while back, over half the entries confessed to being repeatedly distracted by social networking.

There is of course a very simple solution. I could just disconnect (and then perhaps put my modem in a giant bucket of water, freeze it and then bury it somewhere in the garden while blindfolded at midnight), but I just can’t seem to bring myself to cut the cord. Another problem is that the net is my first port of call for research. And, as much as I try and steel myself not to, the temptation to check email/facebook/twitter & co is always there. As Jay Kinney observed in this old post about the debate:

If the hardest part of writing is just making yourself sit there and write, and what used to be a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper has been transformed into a magical portal to a zillion fascinating destinations, then the internet can be a giant and addictive distraction.

We’re hoping to explore the issue further as part of Meanland’s Reading in an Age of Change next year.

 

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