The Death of ‘Deep’ Reading?

Ok, it’s a week old but I’d like to bring your attention to a recent Guardian blog post by BAD IDEA contributor Sam Jordison, which touches on how the Internet is changing the way we read & process information. Sam refers to an interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Nicholas Carr, which suggests technology is turning us all into impatient ‘power browsers’ with 5 second attention spans. Carr’s piece makes a nice comparison between the evolution in our modern information consumption habits, and the changing prose style of Friedrich Nietzsche, which became more telegraphic as he used a typewriter towards the end of his life. The essential point is that modern technology can retrain the loftiest of brains.

Carr’s article brought to mind a Radio 4 discussion show I took part in a couple of weeks back, about the emergence of the Espresso print on demand machine and the Amazon Kindle e-reader – both of which claim to be heralding in a new era of book consumption.

While the general feeling of the radio panel was that these technologies have some way to go to redefine the medium, I tried to make the point that the British book publishing industry really needs to think beyond paper to survive in the long term; young people are the future of the book market, and they are reading less and less – hardly surprising when current computer technology encourages us to ‘info snack’ and skip from link to link.

The modern demands of people in their teens, 20s, and 30s are simply not being met by book publishers, who face a profound challenge. Similarly, the developers of e-readers need to smarten up their act – the Kindle is a step in the right direction, but it’s expensive and it looks ugly. Where are the networked, affordable and SEXY reading devices to smarten up our generation and turn us into the super brained sentients of tomorrow? Over to you, Steve Jobs…

Posted by Jack Roberts in Creative Economy | July 28, 2008 1:07PM |