Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
My 2 cents: 1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.' More here https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes..
Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
Cronus eats his children.
In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
In short, Cronus eats his children.
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
Funny typo in the subtitle.
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue.
I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
I recently read Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, which makes many similar arguments, and found myself agreeing with this. I've been finding it harder and harder to lose myself in a book, to finish books, to read as I used to read. It's as if the lens through which I view reading and books has shifted - from a way to be thrust into another world, to something to be browsed in short, easy-to-read snippets, like social media but with things like covers and jackets and spines.
I'd also like to note that, while the printed book is certainly not perfect at staying through the ages - something like stone tablets are probably best for that - it's a lot more reliable than online things. Maybe that'll change, but for now, tech companies go out of business a lot more frequently than floods or fires or other disasters strike the average house. And while, if Simon and Schuster go out of business, that doesn't do a thing to the books you have purchased from them, if Amazon goes out of business, there's no guarantee any of your Kindle will be readable anymore.
The content committed to print needs to be worth it. I'm a fan of old-school sci-fi, the kind that asks how technology might enhance or undermine the human experience and how that might change, collapse, or raise society to new heights. Right now, the entire genre is in trough of unimaginative, vacuous current-day allegory. Most published work is entirely wrapped up in gender, sex, race, and labor politics. Everything is a stand-in for current political movements and figures, where the setting may as well be set-dressing. No curiosity, no prescience, no fundamental philosophical questioning.
My only reprieve is that sci-fi short story omnibuses contain maybe 20-30% true sci-fi that's exactly what I'm searching for. But buying a print novel off the shelf got to the point where it was wasting my money. And I can only re-read the classics so much.
Waiting for the "sci-fi was always current-day allegory!" sophomorists to flood the comments.
I agree with two major issues raised here. Importance of reading long form content and harms of environment full of distractions.
Saying that solution is not turning back and giving up on digital. It would be same as giving up on printing to embrace a teacher focused learning.
Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of finding and extracting information is different—not better, just different.
Internet is a faster printing press therefore more people can be subjected to more lies than before, but the issue at hand, the one mentioned in Sagan's quote, is orthogonal to that question and predates it. Did the printing press started a revolution in knowledge, or wars of religions?
Can printed books save us?
I admit I oftentime rejoice that printing felt out of fashion, so the printed books that are left are saved from the progress of psyops and the invasion of AI, which may make it easier for future generation(s?) to see through the blindfold of fantasies that will be setup for them.
The article site 1984 as an illustration of how printed books can help resist surveillance. Well, it did not turn out that great for the main character of that book.
Books are a sedative not a cure.
What I found particularly disturbing about this was that I had to swipe away two pop ups and a lower banner just to start reading. All the while my subconscious was asking if I would like to just pick up a book. Then I got distracted by an ad for another article on the right of the screen. .
Someone mentions Postman below so I'm tempted to add: can the tech crowd try a bit of Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Mark Fisher, Marhsall McLuhan, presumably loads of others I don't know about who have done work in these areas, and then maybe Michel Desmurget on the more science-based side of it if they want to avoid any airy-fairy theory.
It's arguably especially wild that Desmurget doesn't get a mention in these discussions. Or, I mean, it would be wild in a world where there was a smooth and effortless flow of good ideas and arguments between people, maybe over some sort of transcontinental network...
A lot of the topics that people have opinions about when it comes to screens and devices and health and etc have loads of studies on them. Which doesn't mean that everything is all solved, there are unexplored and uncertain areas, but reading these discussions you'd think there was no data out there whatsoever. There's tons!
It doesn't mean either that people can't enjoy sharing opinions, some of the anecdotes are interesting and insightful, but there seems to be a few obvious arguments which are basically non-arguments that get trotted out, and which seem to be hindering a more fruitful discussion.
How many times have we seen someone make a point about the bad type of screen-use for someone to say: "yeah, but I use ________ like _________." or "yeah, but when you read books you're being antisocial as well." and so on. The research on the topic distinguishes carefully between the different types of use! Etc etc, I could go on.
This comment is intended constructively
The issue isn't about "screen vs. print", the issue is about "critical, discerning, questioning mind" vs. "mindless consumerism".
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
[1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-pr...
This article is too long, I will let NotebookLM make a fake podcast out of it
Electronic books are, in my opinion, far superior to that "living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood". I can go to Standard Ebooks and quickly download incredible works of imaginative fiction[0] in EPUB format that sync to my phone, my tablet, and my laptop. My notes and highlights[1] also sync. I can select a word that I don't know from the text and quickly look it up in my Electronic copy of Webster's 1913 dictionary. Best of all, I can prop up my tablet on the elliptical trainer and read for an hour while my heart rate moves through the first four zones as increasing amounts of oxygenated blood rush through my brain causing the words to burn like fire in my mind.
Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.
[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch
Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too long. Their quality is uneven (anyone remember the Wheel of Time series?). In the modern era, the production, marketing, promotion, and review of books has become highly politicized. Internet text - blogs, tweets, etc - has the potential to repair these issues.
I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records.
In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year.
Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funded rather differently from the ad-filled old media products.
“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few… [and] when the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
Hmm. Or, when tech is in the hands of everyone and they excessively question those in authority…?
this type of situation is not unique in human history - it happens after the invention of any device that disseminates information on a mass scale. for example, see the printing press:
> The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
What's special about the book? It's the cost, proof of work if you will. If costs nothing to write or read an internet post, so bots, cheap workforce and gullible people can be employed. Only selected few buy books, because it costs money, so it's their vote that counts for the author, the publishers and for fellow readers.
There is no epistemological collapse. Access to accurate information has never been so fast nor so easy. To be sure, lies are spread on the internet - but people believed all sorts of bullshit before the internet. Those who want to claim there is a crisis don’t have a principled argument as to how things are worse.
The irony of reading this article surrounded by a cacophony of flashing and scrolling ads is not lost on me.
IIRC one of the common factor with genius/prodigies of yesteryears is they all worked 1:1 or in a small group with some reasonably talented teachers. Unfortunately that is not scalable for mass, so may be custom designed Device + LLM may work better than giving up digital.
> "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.
I think the main issue with this line of reasoning is that before all of these internet based forms of content, did many people actually read literature, like is mentioned in the article? I am not sure, but I would expect that the books that were read were probably not some high form of art but entertainment - which is fine of course, and it is different to a large extent from scrolling tiktok, but does it like up with the authors thesis about reading providing some deeper form of enlightenment? Maybe it still does, since it's still the same act of reading, but maybe not as much, since it's not normal "intellectual content"
> “Wen Stephenson at the Chicago Review claimed […] he experienced no difference in parsing Seamus Heaney on the page as opposed to the screen, asking “does it matter that it is transmitted to me, voice and word, through a computer? …the question is beginning to bore me by now.”
Well said. For the act of reading digital origin changes the quality but only in minor ways. What we all failed to anticipate we’re the gross effects of segmentation, disintegration, infinite duplication of media.
The reason for epistemological collapse is that people peeked behind the curtain and found that the experts were just normal people endowed not with some magical knowledge but just making things up as they go.
I can do that, too, and sometimes I am better at it. Given that, I prefer reader-side filtering over writer-side filtering.
The title seems to make the incorrect assumption that print (ink on paper) is the only way to read.
I'm skeptical there is any epistemological collapse. Checking Wikipedia because I'm rusty on that stuff, it has epistemology as "the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge." As someone old enough to have been reading paper books pre internet I don't think that's collapsed at all. The very fact that I can look it up on Wikipedia and reference Reddit is a step forward.
The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I come' (Reddit reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
Boring article. How does it go from blaming computers in general and then just picking on Twitter and Reddit - as if these two websites are representative of everything a computer is used for.
Ed Simon's reflection on Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies in In Praise of Print thoughtfully challenges the prevailing assumption that digital media will inevitably replace print.
>> Mine is an estimably materialist variety of mysticism though,
Esteemed by whom?
This is a frustratingly bad article.
The primary argument is hedonistic. The author is arguing that the state of mind created by reading books is what's valuable, and not the content.
This infuriating for me. This is like writing an article in defense of pistachio ice cream. The author has a sensation they enjoy that they want more people to enjoy. I would have trouble coming up with a more trivializing case for physical books. You might as well just talk about the joy of the smell of old books. It's pleasurable, unique, and completely missing on the internet.
The author fails to connect that pleasurable sensation to anything meaningful and so can be easily dismissed.
Whereas other writers, ones the author quotes even, have pointed out how long form content trains concentration, short and long term memory, and critical thought, this author fails to convince that books are anything more than a warm blanket for the mind.
The irony of praising print and rhetoricizing reading on a website that is nearly unreadable due to intrusive visual ads is kind of a sign that collapse is an era behind us.
We really fucked up when we didn’t regulate smart phones like weapons grade uranium.
It’s so fucking toxic. And I’m well aware there are gems in the museum of YouTube math lectures after walking through kilometers of gift shop TikTok shit (and it’s plausible that YouTube will be Alphabet’s undoing because YouTube is great for education and a well educated body politic would hang Pichai and his ilk from a dockyard crane).
Our system (call it capitalism if you like, got a lot of rent in it to appeal to Adam Smith: the father of capitalism thinks low capital gains are rape) can’t cope: it’s no longer just implicated in mental health crisis after mental health crisis, society destabilizing radicalization of (dumb) politics, human sexuality being substantially mediated by people who consider a successful match “churn”, and just every godawful thing.
The HN guidelines quite sensibly admonish everyone to strive for the “best version of the argument”.
Smartphone social media whatever is the worst form of the argument that biological humans can put a morally human life form in charge of anything worth a billion dollars.
There are gems, it’s not all garbage, but if every smartphone on the planet was hit with a hammer tomorrow humanity would look less suicidal in a week. People would start going back to third places, even more importantly fucking at any kind of plausibly sane level, bankers / sociopaths / serial genocidaires / Chamath would go back to being the pariahs with jet skis.
And humanity looks awfully, awfully glum for however awesome GDP astrology says things are.
How do e-readers fit in here?
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant to suppression and physical destruction.
Also some great quotes from 30 years ago, e.g. Carl Sagan's "when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few" the nation would “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness". But did it actually have to end up this way? And is it still possible (with enough collective will power) to push Big Tech profiteering back enough to deliver some of the society enhancing changes originally envisioned in the mid-1990s? Just as it took decades for the full positive implications of the invention of the printing press to come to fruition, perhaps we still need more time before we decry the internet as a net negative?
Haven't read the article but this just sparked a thought that this is similar to email spam: given there's cost to printing you'd expect higher quality. Of course there are still bad actors and the deluded unfortunately.
When you live in a society that no longer values knowledge or compassion, there’s no point is wasting your time trying to go back to the old golden years. Maybe just accept anti intellectualism is the only way to succeed in the world and work around that? Elon Musk, the most successful man in the world is anti intellectual, why would you fool yourself into thinking there might be another future?
> Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism.
Not really news by now but it merits repeating again and again.
>“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents,”
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
[1] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
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The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.