I read two articles this week that seemed to me almost a call-and-response. The first was a piece in Slate, Lazy Eyes: How we read online, by Michael Agger. The other is What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains: Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, appearing in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Agger’s article is simultaneously a how-to for those who’d like to write snappy internet prose, and a reasoned critique of same; Carr arrives obliquely, through his own critique, at a similar but not identical conclusion.
If, as McLuhan famously stated, the medium is the message, then it would seem as though the message is efficient, long on bells and whistles, and stripped down to its barest essentials. Much writing online is barely recognizable as prose, having been stripped to a terse, almost telegraphic economy. Sentences and paragraphs, the staples of the printed page and much of the blogosphere, fall by the wayside in favor of a shorthand that reads like an advertisement. Prose often as not ends up reading like advertising copy, a choppy flow of simple declaratives, bullet points, and sentence fragments. Paragraphs, like this one, are decidedly unfashionable.
Carr argues that that’s half the problem. Writing for the web is generally about trimming the fat, and delivering a maximum of information in the fewest words possible; it’s more Hemingway than, say, Auden. But if you cook, or even if you just like to eat (to extend the metaphor a bit), you know that sometimes it’s the fat that gives a dish its flavor. Too much fat, granted, amounts to empty calories, intellectual or otherwise, but too little leaves you with something that’s bland and unappetizing.
The side effect of this? Carr reiterates an argument that I’ve seen many times before, namely that the way we read doesn’t just mirror the way we think, it actively shapes it. Condensing writing to its bare-bones minimum does the same to our thoughts; by extension, I’d think it could also end up leading moreso to convergent, rather than divergent, thinking. Stripping the creativity from writing in turn leaves our thought process impoverished.
So the internet has changed the way we communicate, the way we read, and finally, quite possibly, the way we think. Does that mean the end of printed, longer-form writing? Not just yet, says Agger:
We’ll do more and more reading on screens, but they won’t replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It’s contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal.” [PDF] He describes the white stuff as “a still point, an anchor for the consciousness.”
Amen to that.
Your assignment for this week: For at least two hours, shut off the computer and go to the library.
I’m as guilty as anyone of using this new style of writing. And as an online reader, I do like the quick hits.
But I also agree that long-form will never completely disappear, as long as there are books and magazines that retain it. I may not read a short story online, but I’ll down a whole New Yorker in a train ride.
Having read a fair amount of your blog, I think you’ve managed to find a happy medium. On the one hand, yes, it’s a shorter form; blogs almost have to be, by definition, since the medium itself doesn’t lend itself to very long-form writing. On the other hand, though, it’s not as though you’ve sacrificed style or readability for the sake of brevity, which is more than can be said for a lot of what’s out there.