In the early days of the web and acceptance of this thing called the Internet, one of my favorite pastimes was to log on via a 28.8 bps modem and my local ISP and use gopher and early betas of Mosaic to poke around the web (or what would become the web). The beauty was that every page had links and information that were fascinating, things I didn't know/hadn't thought about. It was information exploration at its finest, and because I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, I was exposed to things that were unexpected, that challenged my view of the world, that made me stop and think. As the web evolved, as my browsing evolved, information exploration declined. Often, I knew what I was looking for and found it quickly, fact checked and moved on. Blogs, early on, had some of the same magic -- not just information but opinion, loudly expressed. People who were deep experts in areas were now willing to share that broadly, and again I (and I think many others) got a big whack of new information, often hard and challenging information. But there too, as the pool of information has gotten broader, seeking has been replaced by finding, so the sudden "aha" of a new blog or turn of phrase or idea is less frequent.
The other day I was listening to the author of "book lust" giving her recommendation on new books to read, and she noted that one thing she worries about is the unexpected find of a book in the stacks of a library somewhere, that perfect book that is discovered because someone was wandering the stacks and just find it. Hmm, I thought -- good point.
So Friday my morning schedule diverted just a bit and I dropped my daughter off to school, meaning that instead of having a quick commute and listening to "Morning Edition" on NPR for 20 minutes, I got the local NPR show "WeekDay." Being interviewed was Richard Rodriguez, an author I'd not heard of. He was talking about an essay he'd written for Harper's, focused on better understanding the common heritage of the Abrahamic religions that sprung from the desert in the middle east. It was super interesting, in particular a point he made about needing silence/solitude to hear small voices.
I didn't hear the full show, but put a note on my computer to look up the author, and then embarked on a (very busy) day. When I had a few minutes, I did a search for Rodriquez, and then looked for the essay in Harper's, a magazine I seldom read. First off, boy, there's a reason I don't see very many links to Harper's stories on the web - they take the cake for having an awful web experience. Second, as I looked at the table of contents for the essay, I noticed some great stuff....in particular, this essay about books and reading by one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin. Since I'd written about this topic recently, I paused in my searching and read what she had to say. Some excerpts are below, very interesting, which include pieces on the social dynamics of reading, the long tail impact on books and the way publishers are ignoring this, some pretty pointed railing against the status quo, and ends with a jeremiad against publishers in general:
I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.
And then:
If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or other media aren’t readily available, or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?
Finally:
Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Hoo boy, good stuff! Subscribe (dead tree edition) to Harpers.
So Friday drove home a few points for me. First, there is a beauty to information exploration that I need to pay more attention to -- if I'm not careful, I live in an information ghetto of my own making. Second, despite all the wailing to the contrary, there is great reading/thinking/speaking going on -- it just needs to be discovered. Finally, I need to find ways to explore quiet more -- like so many, I am inundated with beeping, buzzing, reading, alerts, all of which are urgent but possibly not always important. Finding places where the quiet voices live, that's a noble goal.