by Sarah Statz Cords
Am I the only person in the world who finds contrarians hugely comforting?
I find I don’t really care what contrarians are being contrary about; I just like it whenever anyone feels the need to stand up and calmly state their opposition to whatever topic is on display. This week I found* two such articles that gave me what I refer to as the “contrarian charge.”
Writing at the New Yorker blog “Interesting Times,” author George Packer described the re-emergence of the magazine The Baffler, and how it did his soul good to watch a magazine devote itself to print and long-form cultural criticism. He also had this to say, about Twitter:
“The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell.”
A week after that blog post appeared, Packer responded to other media bloggers (including the New York Times’ “lead Bits blogger” Nick Bilton) who found his cry of Stop to Twitter silly and overblown. Packer then goes on to say that he knows many people (himself included) who lament the time that Twitter and constant Blackberrying take up, and who miss books and the time they used to give books. It’s a quandary that I think librarians are particularly well-suited to consider: Is reading Twitter or the internet really the same as reading books? What line do we draw between using tools like blogs and Twitter to entice people to read, yet still helping them find the time to read? And, do you agree with Packer when he says this:
“Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions.”
I loved both of these articles (please do read them; Packer’s got some interesting thoughts on the future of journalism, as well), but that phrase gave me the most pause. I think one of the nicest things about librarians is how much we like to ask questions, and how much more we love to answer them. When we jump wholeheartedly into techno-worship, are we entrusting our future (not to mention our reading time) too much to people who don’t like to be asked questions?
*Via links from BookNinja, a literary blogger who can sound lovely contrarian notes of his own.
Techno-worship, as in Library 2.0?
No matter how many tweets you “read”, or how many total characters, they are all chopped up, as is your thinking. I’m finding that I no longer have the concentration I once did (well, some of that is age-related . . . ) and that it takes me longer to get “into” a book. I don’t read as many as I would like, and as I used to, and that’s directly related to 1) having a macbook with wireless access to troll blogs and ebay and 2) too much MSNBC at night.