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Meanland Blog Winner — Catherine Moffat

Catherine Moffat June 22

I’m very pleased to present one of the winning blogs from the Meanland blogging competition. We had four winners overall, and you can see two of the other winning entries over at the Overland blog. This entry was from Catherine Moffat, writing on the topic ‘the Internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest’. You’ll see the winning bloggers start work at Meanland in the coming weeks. Congratulations to Catherine, and I hope you enjoy her entry as much as we did!

‘The Internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest’ has to be up there with ‘the book is dead,’ and ‘libraries are on the decline’. They’re statements that sound plausible until you start to really interrogate them – but we’ll get to the last two some other time. (If you want to catch up on some of the issues, have a look at Meanland on the Significance of the library, and Book deletions, and Sherman Young’s blog and book ‘The Book is Dead’.)

I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but even if you’re the most book loving, computer-phobic person on the planet, your reading habits have already been affected by the Internet. You mightn’t know your wiki from your twitter. You may only read books that have a cover and a spine, and get your newspaper delivered over the fence each morning, but you’ve still been impacted.

You may buy your books from your friendly bookseller, chat up the cute librarian, and discuss the latest bestseller with your mates, just like you’ve done for the last fifty years, but the Internet has affected your reading habits.

Take your morning newspaper. You can head straight for the crossword, or start at the sports pages the way you’ve always done. You can sit on the train and rattle your paper at people swapping headlines on their iPhones, but the newspaper you’re reading today is not the same paper you were reading 15 years ago. It’s manufactured differently, structured differently and the journalists work in different ways.

Journalists use the Internet to gather and exchange material more quickly and they construct their pieces on the assumption that you have at your fingertips a range of supplementary resources. Their articles provide links to longer pieces on the web, in other newspapers, and in other mediums. The explosion of the ‘side bar’ box and an abundance of colour images come to us courtesy of the Internet. Newspaper editors no longer assume that they will be breaking news and the proliferation of by-lines indicates that what we are looking for in our newspapers today is as much expert commentary and interpretation as news.

Then there’s your lunchtime trip to the library. If we take the definition of the Internet at its most basic – as computer devices exchanging information across networks, then chances are your library was an early adopter. The Internet changed your library years ago. Quick connections to other branches and other libraries allow libraries to run distributed collections. Shared catalogues mean more books more quickly for you, and sharing resources allows libraries to eke their limited dollars further.

But even the way the books are chosen has changed. You may not be using the Internet, but your librarian is; your fellow readers are. Instead of waiting for the bookseller, or for literary magazines with reviews to make their glacial way from the Chief Librarian’s desktop, your librarian has quick access to a range of sources including reviews and commentary and sophisticated bibliometrics to help choose the books that grace the shelves.

Similarly, the books produced by publishers, the way authors write and market themselves, and the way booksellers choose books have all been influenced by the Internet. (Witness the huge number of conferences and discussion papers on the future of the book.) Changes in publishing processes dictate what is available in your favourite bookshop – or even the viability of your favourite bookshop.

Publishing models, be they print or digital, subscription or open access are changing. This impacts what is available for you to read in book format, and therefore your reading habits.

I’m guessing if you’re claiming the Internet hasn’t changed your reading habits then it’s because you’re not reading books online, or books that morph into games, or meld with other mediums. You’re not choosing your own endings, or regularly publishing your own content. But then, why are you reading this blog? (Go on, admit it, you have changed.)

I guess at the heart of the assertion is a fear that change rather than broadening your options will limit them. That somehow someone is going to force you to read in a way that you don’t want. But whether you believe we’re breaking free from a television induced stupor into a new world of creativity and Cognitive Surplus like Clay Shirky, or believe with Nicholas Carr that our attention spans are diminishing to those of a gnat, it doesn’t really matter. Putting a finger in the dyke isn’t going to do anything, this time.

Because we read books we’re capable of holding two contradictory thoughts in our head at same time: So the Internet has changed our reading habits, but it will never change our reading. (Go read Fahrenheit 451 if you’re really worried about the death of the book.)

So perhaps when you tell me that the Internet hasn’t impacted your reading you just mean that reading is reading, a choice, a delight, an introduction into individual and shared worlds. In the end, the device, the method, the style, the delivery, or the shape of the words, doesn’t matter.

There always has been just you and the word. There always will be.

 

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