From America’s finest news source:
Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.
Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.
“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”
Sound familiar?
As a teacher who routinely convinces “reluctant readers” to get excited about books, I wonder if I’m ultimately fighting a lost cause.
Consider technology like this. Books’ main competition used to be relatively passive–different forms of sitting and merely absorbing information (TV, movies, the rudimentary Internet). Now, though, with fully interactive e-readers, seamlessly integrating photos, video, hypertext, Flash-esque animation, and more….
As an attorney, it’s a little more difficult for me to see the degradation of people’s ability to cope with large amounts of text—enormous amounts of text are part of my daily work, both reading and digesting them, and producing them. And, as you can tell from my blog, I really like lots of text, without bright colors or pictures. It’s still something of a shock even to have occasional clients who are not accustomed to dealing with large chunks of text—I’ll send them a long letter or a copy of a court document and then be surprised when they haven’t absorbed every word. Such is the cloistered life of learning I have, eh?
On another end of things, I look at my stepdaughter and her fiancé, who are software engineers. They produce a lot of text, too—and the kind of text that would enable a fancy chemistry app on an iPad—but it’s far more esoteric than even my most abstruse blog posts, and I wouldn’t be able to make much sense of it. So the rise of media like the iPad seems to suggest a new divide between learnéd scribes and illiterate peasants. Or is it just adding diversity, since there are still people who produce the “content” that is folded into those iPad apps?
I don’t know. But I love books, and I am one of those crazy people who keeps buying them and thinking, “If the whole world went to hell, and my library was all that survived, would it be a reasonable representation of the breadth and depth of human learning?” Someday, all the iPads will be broken, all the obsolete data formats will be inaccessible, but maybe my books printed on acid-free paper will survive.