Teal deer vs. the novel: is the internet soaking up novel-reading time?
This year I've made one of the World's Most Embarrassing New Year's resolutions. Most of the time my New Year's resolutions involve personal faults that I'm not afraid to admit in public, or at least to my friends, who tend to know about those faults already. It's impossible to know me for more than a week, for example, without realizing that my relationship to chocolate unhealthily resembles the tormented star-crossed love story in Doctor Zhivago. But for the past few years I've come to realize that I have a guilty secret, a habit I've developed slowly but surely without even noticing, a habit that I'd be absolutely aghast to admit in public (so let's just pretend that I'm talking in this post about someone other than myself) --
You know what? For the past few years? I haven't been reading all that many novels.
This snuck up on me because I read ALL THE TIME. For one thing, I do a lot of reading for work. Much of that reading involves writing so bad that you can feel it leaching intelligence and aesthetic sensitivity from your brain, like a sort of life-sucking vampire made out of polysyllabic jargon. Still, it's reading, so when I think back on a week's activities I think: Gosh, reading again, maybe I should get out of the house more often? And then of course there's the internet. Apart from LJ, which for me is simultaneously a place to chat with other people and a source of good stories, I do spend some time reading . . . I dunno, the things you read on the net. All those things: political blog posts, newspapers you wouldn't have physical access to, Digg, Boing boing, Slashdot, um . . . stuff.
So yes, I do spend more time nowadays reading on the net. But I thought of that as an addition to my reading life, not something that had changed it. I still thought of myself as someone who sits around on long summer days with a novel in hand, slowly and steadily communing with a book. And of course (thought I) I do that with lots of novels, pro and fan, all the time.
Only, not. That wasn't happening, or at least it wasn't happening nearly as often as it used to do. Two things brought this change home to me. First, I saw several of you mentioning an LJ community called 50bookchallenge, dedicated, as the name suggests, to encouraging people to read fifty books a year. And I thought, the first few times I saw this: of course I don't need this community, because I read way more than fifty --
And then I stopped, and did a little review in my head of how many books -- particularly pro novels and novel-length fanfic -- I've read recently, and realized: my novel-reading? It's PLUNGED. I still read novels. But nothing like as many as I used to do.
The second thing that brought the change home: I got a Firefox extension that tracked for me my internet time, and reported exactly how many minutes a day I spent on the net, and where I spent it. The results, frankly, shocked me. I expected and found a lot of time on LJ and other fanfic-reading sites, which didn't bug me at all, because fanfic is one of the joys of my reading life. But what stunned me was just how much time I spent elsewhere. Five minutes here, nine minutes there -- and before you know it, the daily total? We're talking hours. Every day.
And since there are only so many hours in a day . . . well, you do the math. More political blogs. More quickie articles about how to make a bedspread out of gumwrappers. More adorable kittens on YouTube. That takes time -- a LOT more time than I thought it did. I still have work and family and friends and housekeeping, and those commitments can't be broken, so what's fallen by the wayside? Novels.
Is this shift in a reader's time allocation a problem? According to Ursula K. LeGuin, yes. In an article in this month's Harper's, she argues that books (as opposed both to visual media and short internet posts) demand an entirely different kind of attention from readers:
Reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. . . . A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind.
A collaboration with the writer's mind. That's a description of reading that resonates with me -- and one that doesn't, imo, necessarily exclude fanfic as a response to reading, despite LeGuin's denial that reading is interactive. Indeed, the idea that reading is fundamentally "collaborative" seems to me like the best possible theoretical justification for fanfic as a natural extension of the reading process. If you're going to write fanfic based on a book, you MUST first devote to the book just the kind of sustained, absorbed attention that LeGuin describes here, an attention that demands you participate in the creation of the book's meaning in your head.
What LeGuin captures here for me is the sense that yes, attention is an ACT, just as running is an act. And just as running a marathon involves a different kind of engagement and dedication and mental endurance than running across the room, so attending to a book or book-length fanfic involves a different kind of engagement than attending to a story on Digg.
And the net, in my opinion, is a wonderful thing in many ways, but as a medium it does not necessarily promote this kind of sustained attention. I'd argue that its evolving social norms actively discourage sustained attention. Yes, you can post novels on the internet, and I've read some great novels, pro and fan, by that means. But the social norms of the internet, even among extremely verbal people, favor short forms. Think about how many times over the past few months you've seen the phrase tl;dr (or the very funny phonetic spelling "teal deer.") The phrase originated on message boards as a way to impose reasonable turn-taking on what was supposed to be a conversation. But over the past few years I've seen it applied more and more outside of conversational contexts. Tl;dr is increasingly not just a joke (War and Peace? Tl;dr). It's a serious readerly expectation. It's part of the ethics of the net.
Maybe that's because net surfers have so many windows open at once, and demanding too much of readers in any one of those windows just seems, well, rude. Maybe it's because our expectations for texts are now shaped by the fact that the net always makes it possible to talk back. When you understand ALL texts as potential conversations, then all texts are governed, at least potentially, by conversational rules -- by the implicit understanding that yammering on for too long is an anti-social or at least asocial act of verbal aggression, like some alpha geek droning on about the latest Linux build at a frat party. Everyone needs to take his turn; to talk for too long doesn't just impose on your listeners or readers -- it steals the time needed for another person's turn. Bad geek! No donut for you.
Erm, I'm beginning to suspect that this post is too long. No doubt it is -- so I'll just say that I've discovered I miss those long summer afternoons attending to just one author. Novels impose silence on their readers, at least for a while, but that silence is in my experience liberating. Free from the conversational expectation that you shape a response at once, you can attend to a novel more slowly, more quietly, more profoundly. Over the two or three days it takes to read a novel, you can be immersed so powerfully in the world of a book that it's still with you when you do other things. This is the opposite of multi-tasking, the opposite of parceling out your attention neatly among a cacophony of voices. It's more like a continual active surrender to the world that you and the author are collaboratively bringing into being. You stand there in your kitchen making coffee, but part of you still lives in the presence of the novel's world and characters, a world persisting in your mind and somehow flavoring your life, saturating it, like a distant music.
I miss that. I want it back, and much as I love Digg and Slashdot and Boing boing, I think I'm going to have to give them a rest for a while. Fifty book challenge? Count me in. I'm up to five.
You know what? For the past few years? I haven't been reading all that many novels.
This snuck up on me because I read ALL THE TIME. For one thing, I do a lot of reading for work. Much of that reading involves writing so bad that you can feel it leaching intelligence and aesthetic sensitivity from your brain, like a sort of life-sucking vampire made out of polysyllabic jargon. Still, it's reading, so when I think back on a week's activities I think: Gosh, reading again, maybe I should get out of the house more often? And then of course there's the internet. Apart from LJ, which for me is simultaneously a place to chat with other people and a source of good stories, I do spend some time reading . . . I dunno, the things you read on the net. All those things: political blog posts, newspapers you wouldn't have physical access to, Digg, Boing boing, Slashdot, um . . . stuff.
So yes, I do spend more time nowadays reading on the net. But I thought of that as an addition to my reading life, not something that had changed it. I still thought of myself as someone who sits around on long summer days with a novel in hand, slowly and steadily communing with a book. And of course (thought I) I do that with lots of novels, pro and fan, all the time.
Only, not. That wasn't happening, or at least it wasn't happening nearly as often as it used to do. Two things brought this change home to me. First, I saw several of you mentioning an LJ community called 50bookchallenge, dedicated, as the name suggests, to encouraging people to read fifty books a year. And I thought, the first few times I saw this: of course I don't need this community, because I read way more than fifty --
And then I stopped, and did a little review in my head of how many books -- particularly pro novels and novel-length fanfic -- I've read recently, and realized: my novel-reading? It's PLUNGED. I still read novels. But nothing like as many as I used to do.
The second thing that brought the change home: I got a Firefox extension that tracked for me my internet time, and reported exactly how many minutes a day I spent on the net, and where I spent it. The results, frankly, shocked me. I expected and found a lot of time on LJ and other fanfic-reading sites, which didn't bug me at all, because fanfic is one of the joys of my reading life. But what stunned me was just how much time I spent elsewhere. Five minutes here, nine minutes there -- and before you know it, the daily total? We're talking hours. Every day.
And since there are only so many hours in a day . . . well, you do the math. More political blogs. More quickie articles about how to make a bedspread out of gumwrappers. More adorable kittens on YouTube. That takes time -- a LOT more time than I thought it did. I still have work and family and friends and housekeeping, and those commitments can't be broken, so what's fallen by the wayside? Novels.
Is this shift in a reader's time allocation a problem? According to Ursula K. LeGuin, yes. In an article in this month's Harper's, she argues that books (as opposed both to visual media and short internet posts) demand an entirely different kind of attention from readers:
Reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. . . . A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind.
A collaboration with the writer's mind. That's a description of reading that resonates with me -- and one that doesn't, imo, necessarily exclude fanfic as a response to reading, despite LeGuin's denial that reading is interactive. Indeed, the idea that reading is fundamentally "collaborative" seems to me like the best possible theoretical justification for fanfic as a natural extension of the reading process. If you're going to write fanfic based on a book, you MUST first devote to the book just the kind of sustained, absorbed attention that LeGuin describes here, an attention that demands you participate in the creation of the book's meaning in your head.
What LeGuin captures here for me is the sense that yes, attention is an ACT, just as running is an act. And just as running a marathon involves a different kind of engagement and dedication and mental endurance than running across the room, so attending to a book or book-length fanfic involves a different kind of engagement than attending to a story on Digg.
And the net, in my opinion, is a wonderful thing in many ways, but as a medium it does not necessarily promote this kind of sustained attention. I'd argue that its evolving social norms actively discourage sustained attention. Yes, you can post novels on the internet, and I've read some great novels, pro and fan, by that means. But the social norms of the internet, even among extremely verbal people, favor short forms. Think about how many times over the past few months you've seen the phrase tl;dr (or the very funny phonetic spelling "teal deer.") The phrase originated on message boards as a way to impose reasonable turn-taking on what was supposed to be a conversation. But over the past few years I've seen it applied more and more outside of conversational contexts. Tl;dr is increasingly not just a joke (War and Peace? Tl;dr). It's a serious readerly expectation. It's part of the ethics of the net.
Maybe that's because net surfers have so many windows open at once, and demanding too much of readers in any one of those windows just seems, well, rude. Maybe it's because our expectations for texts are now shaped by the fact that the net always makes it possible to talk back. When you understand ALL texts as potential conversations, then all texts are governed, at least potentially, by conversational rules -- by the implicit understanding that yammering on for too long is an anti-social or at least asocial act of verbal aggression, like some alpha geek droning on about the latest Linux build at a frat party. Everyone needs to take his turn; to talk for too long doesn't just impose on your listeners or readers -- it steals the time needed for another person's turn. Bad geek! No donut for you.
Erm, I'm beginning to suspect that this post is too long. No doubt it is -- so I'll just say that I've discovered I miss those long summer afternoons attending to just one author. Novels impose silence on their readers, at least for a while, but that silence is in my experience liberating. Free from the conversational expectation that you shape a response at once, you can attend to a novel more slowly, more quietly, more profoundly. Over the two or three days it takes to read a novel, you can be immersed so powerfully in the world of a book that it's still with you when you do other things. This is the opposite of multi-tasking, the opposite of parceling out your attention neatly among a cacophony of voices. It's more like a continual active surrender to the world that you and the author are collaboratively bringing into being. You stand there in your kitchen making coffee, but part of you still lives in the presence of the novel's world and characters, a world persisting in your mind and somehow flavoring your life, saturating it, like a distant music.
I miss that. I want it back, and much as I love Digg and Slashdot and Boing boing, I think I'm going to have to give them a rest for a while. Fifty book challenge? Count me in. I'm up to five.