A) Hello, Blogdom!
B) This post serves as an adjunct to Lesley’s earlier post on “The Experience of Reading” and Kerry’s “The Price We Pay.” And perhaps I echo Keaton's fear.
I love to read the New York Times. More so, I love to read American newspapers. Not only because they give me exciting stories about the world, but because I pride myself in knowing the technique of reading them. As anybody knows, if you don’t hold the newspaper in the right way, it might come apart (some pages will come misaligned, etc.). The newspaper reader’s technique involves (a) holding it in the right way (b), taking out the small “packages” of information contained within the paper (that is, taking out the “arts” or “business week,” mini-magazines in themselves, from the body of the newspaper) and (b) being okay with the fact that an article will be scattered all over the newspaper (the one that starts on A2 continues on A18, and so forth). Furthermore, there are also proper ways of putting the newspaper in your bag so that it doesn’t dismember itself.
While this may be common knowledge to the average newspaper reader, it is something that I have had to get used to. Back where I live, in Puerto Rico, most newspapers have more of a “book” or “magazine” format, where you just… well, turn the pages. In the NYT, if you want to read the Arts section, you have to literally separate that segment. Indeed, in some way, you ‘dismantle’ a part of the paper. The NYT consists of a pool of little “packages” of information which the reader selects, as if selecting a particular pencil from a drawer. This feeling of “taking out a package” from a “drawer” is made all the more manifest by the physical format of the NYT.
(As far as reading newspapers goes, I am still very much a padawan. Much like Luke Skywalker at the beginning of “A New Hope,” if I were to be given a NYT while blindfolded, in fifteen minutes there would be a mess of papers all around the room. But I love to read it, and I love to feel it: the texture of the paper, the typeface, and the small columns of clustered letters, the accidental ink blots on the corner of the page—you name it. Moreover, I love knowing that as I walk down the halls of Loyola, the newspaper lies neatly folded among my books in my backpack, waiting to be read before it is thrown to the trash—or recycle bin.)
Enter: digital media in its various forms. That is, the internet, the iPhone, the e-reader, and so forth. All of these have been seen as threats to the old, clunky but lovable newspaper in print.
So now I have an iPhone; and in my iPhone, I’ve got a Twitter app. I follow the BBC, the NYT, CNN, Barack Obama, and The Onion, among others. I can see their headlines on my screen and click on those which interest me the most. Much like the different physical packages of information that I select from the newspaper, here I select digital packages and read those which I prefer. Because it really must come down to that—I can’t read all the overwhelming information from all the news sources.
Which leads me to what Barry Schwartz called the paradox of choice. I will not repeat his lecture here (though I have provided a link to a video in which he explains it). But it all boils down to this: in our society, we have been taught that we have the “choice” to do whatever we want. We choose our food, our pants, our lovers, our religion. And that’s great. But what happens when you go to a supermarket and you see that there are over 50 breakfast cereals you can choose? Or that once you choose to be a Christian, you have to choose what kind of Christian you want to be (do you want to be an Evangelical, a Catholic, or one of the Jesus Camp kids?).
I remember going to The Strand bookstore (’18 Miles of Books!’) in New York this past Spring Break. Three floors. Stacks, stacks, and more stacks. The advertisement does not lie: there are eighteen miles of books in this store. I was overwhelmed. Why? Because I didn’t know what choice to make, amidst this mist of choices. Thus, the paradox of choice.
Wouldn’t we be facing the same dilemma with digital media? With digital media, there is no limit to the amount of books we can have in a store—we can have 18, 18,000, or 18,000,000 miles of virtual books, for all we care.
Since the state does not (and cannot) control the flow of information (otherwise this would be a totalitarian state, which the twentieth century taught us was a big no-no), then it must let the information run free. But if information runs free with such great numbers, whose brain would be big enough to take it in?
The physical newspaper, even if it is clunky, limits this wide panorama, and allows me to focus on this or that article—on this or that “package of information.” The newspaper is a drawer; but the virtual world is an endless archive.
