Welcome to my bag, coffee table, bookshelf, desk, and nightstand
Who cares if Google makes us dumber. What if digital kills the lit crush?
Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes–Journey or the Smiths?–littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.
Nowhere is this problem more apparent, and more serious, than in the imperilment of the Public Book–the book that people identify us by because they can glimpse it on our bookshelves, or on a coffee table, or in our hands. As the Kindle and Nook march on, people's reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We'll go into people's houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we'll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.
The writer, Mark Oppenheimer, admits some people won't care. "This essay is for the rest of you," he writes on Slate, "the ones who freely admit to having been seduced by a serendipitous volume of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John glimpsed on a potential girlfriend's living-room shelf or by a spine-broken copy of Robert Lowell sitting atop that boy's nightstand. Maybe that was your first time in the apartment, you had been reluctant to go, and now you wanted to linger a while …"
That ellipsis is both his and all of ours — "the ones who freely admit to having been seduced by a serendipitous volume." One could write the same essay for music. I think the arguments explain my Amazon habit, the one where I keep asking the corporation to send me physical, UPS packages. Or at least the arguments explain half of this. The first half, we do for ourselves, depending on our characters. We put pieces of expression around us to identity, reinforce or challenge who we are.
But the second half, we do for you, the ones with whom we hope to begin an exchange. Here are our narrative wares, we say. Barter.
There are digital substitutes. One of my favorite research bits from the past years has been how we trade links and content socially, where a news story about a power outage means "I care" and video of Merton the improv piano player means "I love you, take off your clothes." (Or something like that.) Friendships and relationships thrive on content.
The problem is links are infinite. They're the proverbial hill of beans.
What you need, to stretch the proverb, is Paris just before war. Tables can only hold so many books. A person can only pick up one at a time. When Oppenheimer writes about what we "carry," the issue at heart is scarcity. The challenge of the modern romantic is not the new digital infinite but how to use that world to create scarce and unique lives.
August 5th, 2010 at 9:41 AM
Great, insightful post! I was just thinking about this stuff this morning while I looked over the shoulder of the passenger in front of me who was engrossed in her kindle. I wondered what she was reading and if she missed holding the actual book in her hands and the feeling of turning the pages. It made me yearn for a book. I then looked across the way and noticed a young 20-something gentleman thoroughly enjoying his copy of Eat, Pray, Love. I wonder if he's going to see the movie next weekend.
August 5th, 2010 at 3:27 PM
Very informative article, thanks for sharing.
August 5th, 2010 at 11:13 PM
I'd buy that. Studying before a big movie date.
Your comment inspired me to look at everyone's books today. The girl next to me on the ride home tonight was reading an economic chapter from a Mitt Romney book. I don't care what the politics are, reading a politician's economic writings immediately after getting out of work is wrong.