The Fate of Books in a Digital Age -- March 9, 1999

Tonight I want to share some undigested reflections relevant to all learned people: What are the implications of the much-ballyhooed digital revolution for the culture of books?

This question seems particularly germane to an audience of initiates into Phi Beta Kappa, for, as Thomas Carlyle recognized, "What we become [in our adult lives] depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

I was prompted to think about the fate of the book a few weeks ago when I encountered a provocative statement by the Canadian writer Robert Fulford. He announced that the traditional book is in danger of becoming "an outdated shrine, a place only for occasional worship."

The dwindling interest in books and serious reading raises an obvious question: As we rush to get "on line," as we make the transition from book to screen, are we abandoning some of the basic premises and processes of liberal learning?

Books, after all, have been the main conduits of knowledge since medieval days. Yet now we are told that the bound book has become an outdated and doomed technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days.

The dean of architecture at MIT predicts that books in the 21st century will be irrelevant "except to those addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow."

I must confess that I am such an addict. I love books made of wood pulp and leather.

Even though I spend much of my working day in front of a computer screen manipulating a twitching cursor, I remain devoted to books. I buy them, borrow them, loan them, and give them away. I read them, review them, write them, collect them, stumble over them, think about them, even dream about them.

Books make for pleasing company. They are quiet, accessible, and patient. They don’t whine or call during the dinner hour, nor do they carry grudges. They suffer interruptions with grace, are eminently portable, and provide wise counsel.

Of course, books are more than a source of intellectual interest; they can also become objects of art and affection.

In our simple house, in fact, books furnish the rooms. They line the shelves to overflowing and sit in untidy stacks on tables or in corners.

On occasion, provoked by a fleeting sense of order and proportion, I gather up the most exposed and under-appreciated books and donate them to a local school or library. Yet no sooner do I winnow the volumes than the craving for more reasserts itself.

Such is the fate of the bibliophile. Like an alcoholic attracted to a liquor store, I cannot pass a bookshop without going in. Once inside these alluring bazaars, I stroll the aisles, lingering here and there, pulling one book and then another off the shelves, scanning the table of contents with ravishing eyes, seduced by the crisp new pages and firm bindings.

There is something almost sensual in the feel and heft of a new book. The aroma of paper, glue, and ink excites the senses.

My preference for books over other pleasures puts me in distinguished company. When the ancient Roman orator Cicero met Cleopatra he asked not for a night of love, but whether the Queen of the Nile would lend him some volumes from the legendary library at Alexandria.

Similarly, Erasmus, the great 16th century Christian humanist, confessed that "When I get a little money, I buy books; and, if any is left, I buy food and clothes."

Erasmus knew that the silent wisdom contained in books and the cocooned pleasures of reading supersede more superficial pursuits.

Yet while voracious in my taste for reading, I have not gone so far as the English woman who ate an entire New Testament, day by day, between two sides of bread and butter. She did so as a remedy for fits.

Books can indeed be therapeutic. Of all the forms of human relaxation, reading is the most dignified way to redeem time and solace the soul.

A book a day, as we used to tell our children, keeps Geraldo and Oprah away!

But of all the gifts that literature delivers, the capacity of reading to connect us with others is the one most often overlooked and undervalued. Books can liberate us from the provincialism of our selves. They transport us away from home and our workaday routines into a realm of new experiences, challenging ideas, and interesting people. In the process of capturing our imagination, books help dramatize our days and enrich our sense of the joys of being human.

But I am being too general. Let me use the ballast of a concrete example to suggest why I am so enamored of books and the opportunity they provide to expand and inform our sense of human community.

For the last month or so, I have had the pleasure of reading the collected novels and stories of Eudora Welty, the genteel 90-year-old Mississippi native who writes with poetic clarity and sympathetic curiosity about the people of the Mississippi Delta.

"What I do in writing of any character," she once explained, "is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself."

Eudora Welty’s writings help us imagine being different. In the process of introducing readers to the folkways and myths, manners and mores of the area known as the Yazoo Trace, she makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Her luminous prose is seasoned with authentic details and saturated with the tang and scent of the Delta.

Consider this arresting description from a bittersweet love story entitled "At the Landing": "The river went by immeasurable under the sky, moving and dimly catching and snagging itself, freeing itself without effort, heavy with its great waves of drift, deep with stirring fish."

There is no straining in such observant prose. Like an impressionist painter, Welty stipples her narratives with delicate ironies and astute observations, all bright as a needle point.

She often uses humor to bring her characters alive, as in this passage from Delta Wedding: "His hands took her by the hair and pulled her up like a turnip. On top of the water he looked at her intently, his eyelashes thorny and dripping at her . . . "I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t come right up," said Roy suddenly. "I thought girls floated.’"

Welty’s narrative art reveals how literature can transform the mundane into the magical and invest ordinary lives with a dignity that defies their degrading circumstances. Her writings not only offer information; they reward our attention by giving language to dream, story to memory, empathy to reflection.

How this occurs, how the process of reading great literature affects our psyche, remains a mystery, but this much is sure: The honing of our rational capacities depends upon the narrative imagining contained in books.

Narratives provide time with a shape and direction — and so we tell and listen to and read stories in order to understand what and where we are, to make sense of lives unfolding in time.

In the process of distilling stories from words, we hone our capacity to imagine being different, to enter into the lives and experiences of others. By reading intently, we also compose our own story in an effort to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others.

Story-reading and story-telling are thus our chief means of understanding the past and looking into the future, of seeing and appreciating differences among people. In the end, however, the act of reading forces us to undertake the most difficult feat of all: to think for ourselves.

Yet in this multimedia age and this frenetic era of diminished leisure, the habit of reading bound books is on the wane. The frenzied pace of our wired and wireless world often denies us the time to engage a serious book. People much prefer the less strenuous pleasures of television and video.

So where does this leave us as readers? The fate of books and of reading has become the subject of some very sophisticated discussion of late. Let me cite just two prominent participants in this cultural debate.

In 1993 Richard Lanham, an English professor at UCLA, published a book entitled The Electronic Word in which he hailed the impact of new circuit-driven technologies, proclaiming that electronic media will transform "the arts and letters into one activity as never before."

Words printed on paper, Lanham contends, are static and inert, trapped in a formal arrangement assigned them by some anonymous staff member at a publishing house. To liberate texts from such artificial constraints, Lanham believes, they must be digitized, downloaded, and then displayed and enlivened through hypertextual media.

The term "hypertext" was coined a quarter century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson. He invented the label to describe the writing done in nonlinear space made possible by the computer.

Unlike conventional printed text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments for the reader to choose from. Such hyptertexts, Lanham claims, will "disempower . . . the force of linear print." They will also democratize literature by enabling the user to participate in the text and manipulate its meanings rather than simply be a passive reader.

Lanham thus views the digital revolution as liberating the individual from the tyranny of the book, the finality of printed text, and the domination of the author. In adopting such a stance, Lanham represents a postmodern sensibility that wants to free the reader from dependence on the author and make all literary and artistic creations interactive and open-ended.

To be sure, the notion of every reader being a creative writer through the medium of hypertext promises an engaged immediacy that is seductively attractive. Lanham speaks with earnest passion for those eager to see the electronic revolution run its course and supplant the conventional book.

On the other hand, many equally reputable commentators are resisting the imperial presumptions and anarchic possibilities of computer technology.

In 1994 Sven Birkerts, a literary critic who teaches at Mount Holyoke, published a collection of powerful essays entitled The Gutenberg Elegies.

It is one of the most stimulating books I have encountered. Birkerts writes with the emotional urgency of a zealot. He argues that never before has the life of the mind in America been more imperiled. We are living in a state of intellectual emergency — a crisis caused by our naïve willingness to embrace new "televisual" technologies at the expense of the book.

For Birkerts, the postmodern world so eagerly embraced by Lanham and others offers us in fact a Faustian bargain in which we sell our souls in exchange for a "digital future." To Birkerts, the printed page and circuit-driven technologies represent fundamentally opposed forces. In the process of relying on machines to retrieve information and provide "infotainment," young folks have lost opportunities for in-depth thinking about meaning and values.

The well-read person is disappearing. Instead, we now are surrounded by technopunks who can retrieve whole libraries of information with a keystroke and who chill out by watching MTV, but cannot appreciate the sophisticated talents of Jane Austen or Henry James.

"As the world hurtles on," Birkerts laments, " . . . the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise. As we ponder that act, profound questions must arise about our avowedly humanistic values, about spiritual versus material concerns, and about subjectivity itself."

Like many of us, Birkerts likes nothing better than curling up with a good book, and he is at his best describing the solitary act of reading: the sensations of it, the obsession and allure of it, the way a novel or biography snares you in its imaginative web long after you’ve finished the final page.

In short, Birkerts provides a lover’s insight into the romance of reading. He correctly notes that while we have mastered the science of processing and communicating mountains of information, we have not yet figured out how to process and deliver wisdom at the speed of light.

In this regard we would do well to remember Woody Allen’s boast that he had taken a speed reading course and had just completed Tolstoy’s War and Peace in two hours. When asked what he had learned from the novel, he replied: "It’s about Russia."

Birkerts raises his devotion to the printed word to a spiritual level: the traditional book is for him a holy relic embodying everything he holds sacred. He thus dismisses hypertext as visually seductive but ultimately ugly and boring. And he insists that the medium through which words are conveyed changes their essence. As he explains, the "tree hiked to and seen is not the tree driven to and seen, even though it is the same tree."

What Birkerts sees at stake is nothing less than the tradition of Western humanism. He claims that "our entire collective subjective history — the soul of our societal body — is encoded in print. . . . If a person turns from print. . . then what happens to that person’s sense of culture and continuity?"

Birkerts is a compelling defender of the printed book. Like a true believer listening to a tent revivalist, I found myself at times nodding and swaying in agreement as I read The Gutenberg Elegies.

I, too, believe in the sanctity of aesthetic experience and in the ability of reading to help us achieve some profound connection with other human beings, however slight and fleeting, and however compromised by the indeterminacies of signs and the structures of meaning and power imposed by our cultural contexts.

Yet while sympathetic to Birkerts’s anxiety for the fate of the book, I do not share his apocalyptic panic in the face of our wired world. As his jeremiad unfolds, he subverts his argument by dismissing all forms of electronic media.

Here’s a typical statement from The Gutenberg Elegies: "[circuit and screen] are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness."

Such hyperbole undermines an otherwise moving tribute to the culture of reading. In the end, I found Birkerts’s argument arresting but not convincing.

Just as the pencil has survived the typewriter, books will survive in our digital world. They may even flourish among the beep and click as readily as they did on the printed page.

As both a theoretical and a practical matter, we need to engage rather than dismiss the digital revolution and its implications. Like it or not, it is the future that your generation has inherited.

Yes, reading text from a screen rather than a printed page may produce a different series of responses from the reader, but such responses may not necessarily be incompatible with those stimulated by a printed book. In coming years bound books and electronic books will exist side by side, and they may in fact come to complement one another in delightful ways.

No, my friends, the choice we face is not simply between computer screen and printed page — it is much more urgent and stark: namely, between a future in which serious reading has a discernible influence within our culture and one in which it does not.

That we are faced with this choice has little to do with whether a book is in print or pixel form, and everything to do with the nature of well-established mass media such as radio, television, and film, and the commercialized mass culture these media have engendered.

These beguiling forms of passive entertainment have immersed us in the trivial and the ephemeral. As a result, fewer and fewer people find sustained reading sufficiently stimulating, and, as a consequence, the verbal scores and rhetorical abilities of young people are steadily declining.

Virtual reality and digital graphics encourage us to bypass writing and even language altogether, suggesting that words are outdated substitutes for graphics and video.

At the same time, fewer adults engage in regular reading. Some 15 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate and as many as 40 percent have only minimal reading skills. The illiteracy rate in the United States is three times higher than that in supposedly backward Russia.

But how can this you might ask? Bookstores seem to be doing a thriving business. Yet only ten percent of the population reads 70 percent of the books published in the United States, and the majority of adults never read for pleasure.

Close reading and deep thinking are demanding activities, and most people would rather watch TV or play a video game or attend a Phi Beta Kappa lecture.

If we do not sustain a commitment to reflective reading, then it matters little whether the books of the future are printed or electronic. Our capacity to form critical opinions and make informed decisions will continue to diminish.

So I end these rambling meditations with an avuncular plea directed at you new Phi Beta Kappans: years from now, when you finally leave your parents’ homes and get your first jobs, turn off the TV and the computer once or twice a month and pick up a book, in any of its forms.

The habit of reading will keep you humble, invigorated, and informed. It will expand your horizons and it will keep you thinking when all of your other faculties are diminished. Other than marital bliss and wine, learning is perhaps the only source of satisfaction that improves with age.

One of the most important things a college can do is to nurture in students the desire to keep on thinking deeply and learning eagerly throughout their lives. In this regard, let me conclude by sharing with you the publisher’s advertisement for Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s famous novel that first appeared in 1951.

The blurb predicted that "this unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart — but you will never forget it." The same could be said for this great college and its commitment to lifelong learning — and lifelong reading.