ECS | The Nepali Way

S P I L L E D I N K

The Death of Reading and Writing?
By Don Messerschmidt

A recent posting on wired.com (the online affiliate of Wired, the popular magazine) ran under this startling headline: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated. The subject is spot-on for anyone interested in current and future trends in technology, entertainment, communications, science and culture (which is what Wired is all about).

The essence of the rumors and Eliot Van Buskirk’s article is that conventional wisdom is wrong about our reading habits, or their transformation. It is popularly assumed that new digital technologies (iPods, YouTube, videogames, cable TV) are taking us away from the written word. That we don’t read any more.

If you believed that, you’d stop reading and writing!
The weight of scientific opinion is that we have not stopped, but that we have clearly changed how we read and write.

For example, after Email became popular, many of us stopped writing letters longhand or on typewriters to send off in stamped envelopes through the archaic postal system. Instead, we compose them on computers and send them out through cyberspace, digitally, to our friends and family, often with instant replies. Or, just as likely, we snd a txt msg lol, truncated like this (‘lots of laughs’), by cell phone.

What about magazines, newspapers and books – those comfortable, conventional and hitherto ubiquitous forms of print media that we all enjoy holding, reading, and sometimes writing for?

Newspapers ostensibly give us the news, but when 24-hour news radio came along (BBC, for example), we found that we could hear the news now, fresher and hotter, well ahead of tomorrow’s inky print version. And when we turned to the Internet, we discovered that we could see and read it even faster online, well illustrated, often with streaming video, with a place at the end to post comments. So we let our print subscriptions lapse, and, as a result, a large number of newspapers and magazines around the world have gone out of business. Mediabistro.com keeps track of the media revolution and posts almost daily obituaries for print publications that have gone under. Blame the global recession, too.

None of this heralds the end to reading, however; only that digital has taken over from print. Unfortunately, many print publishers have been slow at encountering the digital takeover.

Books, too, are affected, and both publishers and authors are concerned as they watch their output (and sometimes their livelihoods) being digitized online, all or in part, open access, for free. There are over seven million books available at books.google.com. And check out bookglutton.com where, instead of just reading a digital book, you can also annotate it on screen and discuss it with others, worldwide.

It all comes down to something that writer Clive Thompson said in a May 2009 article in Wired (the print version): “We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.”

The issue here is technology and what it has done to our reading and writing habits. Digital transformation. A recent study shows that while reading suffered some decline with the advent of TV, it has shot back up to even greater heights in the past few decades. We read much more today than ever before, only the greater proportion of it is digital, on screen in one form or another.

This doesn’t mean that the book publishing and book marketing industries are about to disappear. Not yet, and not in Nepal. We all know that print publishing is still alive and well in Kathmandu where bookstores are as busy as ever. For what else can we do but read a book when the screen goes blank as the electricity goes out (or the batteries die) for so long, so often, these days? (Has anyone analyzed the rise of the candle-making industry under such circumstances?)
¦ Good Writing, and Reading!

Read Van Buskirk’s article. ‘Rumors of written-word death...’ at www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/reading-expands-study; and ‘Clive Thompson on the future of reading in a digital world’ at wired.com/print/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/st_thompson.
Don Messerschmidt is a freelance writer and contributing editor to ECS Nepal magazine. Contact him at don.editor@gmail.com and read his blog ‘Himalayan Snows’ at dmesserschmidt.blogspot.com.