The author Alberto Manguel's library consists of 30,000 books. He rebuilt a fifteenth century barn on his property in Mondion, France, to make room for his collection.
In Michael Greenberg's recent Freelance column in The Times Literary Supplement, we learn that Manguel can't bear to throw away his books. "Not even the bad ones," he says. My own collection of books is astonishingly small compared to Manguel's number. Still I'm drawn to anyone who has serious trouble discarding books.
But in a recent literary event at the New York Public Library, Manguel lost me with his thoughts on the Internet. He insists the computer is a technological step backwards for readers, since it replaces the "codex with the scroll."
Manguel's comments reminded me of a conversation I had about 5 years ago. At that time, an activist told me about reading an interview I did with Sr. Joan Chittister for The Social Edge. But they didn't like reading online. Instead they printed the article. Overhearing the conversation, a gentleman indicated he preferred reading online. He may have been defensive for me, but it's noteworthy that an entire generation is now growing up reading online.
It's interesting where criticism of the Internet comes from these days. In Maclean's magazine recently, Steve Maich enumerated the shadowy side of the Web. But he conveniently (and even shockingly) left out the extraordinary advances that have occurred on the net. "You can't help but wonder, what else might we have done with all that time and money if we hadn't blown it on the Internet," he said. He sounded as if he'd just lost at Russian roulette.
At a Church Press Conference I attended two years ago --I remember speaking with a senior editor at a Christian book publisher. We spoke about the changes occurring as a result of the Internet. Then he mentioned that some colleagues at the book publisher were initially sceptical about the Internet. "They kept telling me: Don't go there --there will be dragons," he said.
But look at what the Internet has meant for book publishers. Writing in The New York Review of Books recently, Jason Epstein talks about the radical decentralization of the digital marketplace. He explains that preliminary evidence suggests greater choice will create greater demand for books. "An obvious example are books in Spanish to serve the 40 million Hispanics now living in the United States and poorly served by sparse retailers," he says.
Interestingly Epstein mentions an essay by Mark Sandler in Libraries and Google. There we learn about an experiment by the University of Michigan Library involving the digitization of 10,000 "low use" monographs offered on the Web which produced between 500,000 and one million hits a month. In the past, Sandler says, these works were accessible to a base population of 40,000 students, faculty, and staff. "That's about four readers for each book included in the project," he adds. "When electronic versions of these works were made accessible to the entire world, suddenly 40,000 potential readers became 4 billion, and the odds of consumer interest jumped 4:1 to 400,000:1."
Like the print and broadcast media, the Internet should be the subject of rigorous critique. But the argument that the computer is a step backwards for readers isn't accurate. I've argued for years that reading online isn't inferior to book reading. That "mysterious communion" that can result when the reader and author meet on a printed page isn't lost on a digital page.
In a recent review of Andrew Chadwick's new book Internet Politics, Clive Matthews notes the danger of writing about the Internet today. He says that no attempt to provide an overall summary of even a small aspect of the World Wide Web can ever hope to be fully up to date. He adds that: "The first website only went live in August 1991, and the web is still so fast-moving that even just a year ago the video-sharing site YouTube, now one of the most popular on the net with more than 100 million daily hits, was practically unknown, indeed not even officially launched."
Among the many blind spots in the criticism of the Internet is how the mainstream press covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For example: The big dailies (including The New York Times) astonishingly accepted the fixed intelligence peddled by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. But the Internet did provide alternative analysis, reports, and commentary by way of smaller publications, alternative websites and blogs.
Too much of the criticism directed at the Internet today is given a free pass. It's easy to point to "amateur" websites and blogs. But in the coverage of the Iraq War, the Internet showed it was a freer medium. This doesn't make it necessarily superior. But it does present a challenge to the mainline print and broadcast news media that traditionally fear competition of any sort. Let's remember that when CNN began in 1980, they were held in contempt (and even ridiculed) by NBC, ABC, and CBS. No one is laughing now.
Whether we're reading the printed page or online, the authentic voice still commands attention. That voice doesn't change because it's in a digital format. If it's articulated well, those voices have the potential to make us re-think conventional wisdom and rejuvenate us with new ideas.
Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.
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