Excuse me for disagreeing with Bill Quick about that, as I sit in my home office surrounded by a vast personal library of hundreds of books. The idea that we are transitioning permanently and irrevocably to an electronic future, where words printed on paper are of no value, would seem contradicted by various facts.
Is your computer hooked up to a printer? How often do you buy ink cartridges and paper for that printer? Is there a a book, magazine or newspaper within arm’s reach of where you’re sitting this very minute? Do you have a business card — ink on paper — in your pocket or purse? Do you have printed memos or presentations on your office desk?
Digital enthusiasts are to be forgiven for loving what they do and doing what they love, but you can love your Kindle without succumbing to active hostility toward the dead-tree medium, per se. And it struck me years ago, after reading Sven Birkert’s brilliant book The Gutenberg Elegies, that there are certain intrinsic values of the printed book which may be lost by a hasty abandonment of dead-tree publishing.
Having learned to read with books, and having learned to write with pencil and paper — an experience I share with all literate adults, including Bill Quick — I am skeptical that current or future youth would obtain the same educational value, qualitatively, by learning their lessons from electronic media.
We see evidence of this problem already: Some educators have increasingly abandoned old-fashioned drill-work and recitation, based on the assumption that students don’t need to know facts, but rather need only the “research skills” to look up whatever they wish to know. Unfortunately, that pedagogical stance doesn’t encourage kids to develop the knowledge base necessary to evaluate critically whatever turns up on Google.
We have witnessed a plague of plagiarism and cheating among college students, and have also seen astonishing incidences of young journalists publishing plagiarized or fictionalized “news.” Many kids nowadays aren’t taught the value of knowing — committing facts to memory — and this deficit, an unforeseen consequence of the skills-based approach to education, impedes their intellectual abilities in many ways. Excuse me for thinking that this problem is closely related to the digital enthusiasms encouraged during the 1990s (after Al Gore invented the Internet), and fostered by the thoughtless cut-and-paste habits that too many students employ routinely when doing online research.
Pronouncing the doom of the book may be emotionally satisfying to those of us who nowadays write mainly for an online readership (and read mainly online writers), but excuse my old-fashioned mind for the concern that something valuable might be lost in a too-hasty race from print to pixels.
(Hat-tip: Instapundit, whose frustrations with an automated phone-tree ought to be an object lesson in the perils of technological “progress.”)
