Blogs are Literary Fast Food

Unlike most people I find it much easier to read on the computer screen than to read on paper. All of the things people complain about don't seem to bother me. Unfortunately that leaves me with a tendency to read a lot of short articles and blogs while I think that I should be spending more effort on complex, book-length pieces. The article in Library Journal by the new president of the American Library Association titled Revenge of the Blog People twisted a lot of knickers in blogland recently. The blog intelligentsia took offence at the notion that information presented in little blurbs and smatterings could be ruining peoples' ability to digest complex arguments and ideas that take longer than a few paragraphs to present.

He's right, of course, and it struck me that I often feel like a kid in a candy store when I'm on the internet, trying to get as much of a variety of information as I can and forgetting to pause to really digest something fully before moving on to the next interesting-looking flavour.

Just imagine the chemical acrobatics your brain must do as you read down the front page of MetaFilter. Each paragraph on some different subject, so memories and associations get yanked out left and right at a pace much faster than the slow, deliberate pace when reading a book on a single given subject. Essentially riding a motorcycle through the Louvre.

I heard an quote once that stuck in my memory: “A man should know something about everything and everything about something” but I feel like I want to know everything about everything. But the physical difficulty I sometimes feel reading books is starting to frustrate me. And then there's the fact that I can't easily search back through the books I've read with Google te way I can with the web. When I would read books in the library while doing research for some paper or project in university I would always take notes as I read and copy down important sentences or proofs or whole paragraphs. And as that became a habit I started doing the same thing when I read things on my own; "OK I'm reading this now, but I probably won't be able to find this quote again, better grab it."

Unfortunately things like these automated book scanners are still in the “if you have to ask, you can't afford it” range. Wouldn't I love to have one of those to feed an armload of library books to each week.

Oh well, back to trawling Project Gutenberg and hoping for wider adoption of Creative Commons publishing. Or waiting for this idea to reach the boonies: Library Lends Out Book-Filled iPod Shuffles.