by John Freeman
Empirical evidence is flooding in regarding the ways that screen-based reading, which has grown from e-mail, is changing the way we read generally. Eye-tracking studies have shown that people increasingly tend to leapfrog over long blocks of text. We need bullet points, bold text, short sentences, explanatory subheads, and speedy text. People skim and scan rather than rummage down into the belly of the beast. Online readers are “selfish, lazy, and ruthless,” said Jakob Nielsen, a usability engineer, in an amusing article by Slate’s Michael Agger. Instead of explaining concepts in a text, Nielsen advised putting in hyperlinks to other articles where readers can pick up other concepts. Even the most usability-enhanced article and layout, however, can lose out on the Web. “[Spontaneous reading pleasure] can be achieved,” Agger writes, “but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.”
More and more people—increasingly young ones—are doing their reading in this environment. In 2008, a Swarthmore College English major read the entirety of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl on his BlackBerry; the small screen and being interrupted by e-mails and IMs didn’t bother him (perhaps this says more about James than the student). He is not alone, if not in reading James on a screen, then in reading a book on a handheld. The company Fictionwise, which provides e-books for PalmPilots, iPhones, and other handhelds, has a staggering inventory of 53,000 titles, equaling 971.6 billion words, used by more than half a million users.
In July 2008, the New York Times reporter Motoko Rich went to Ohio and reported on how a fifteen-year-old consumes her nightly media diet. “Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.” Nadia’s mother wasn’t necessarily worried: “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
It’s not a huge surprise, at least in the United States, that there has been a huge dropoff in how many Americans, especially young Americans, read for fun. Less than one-third of thirteen-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from twenty years ago; on an average day, Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four spend two hours watching television and just seven minutes reading. As a result, reading test scores are plummeting, even among well-educated adults. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school educational experience who tested as proficient in prose reading dropped by ten points. Critics argue that these results discount reading done online, but so far the benefits of that reading are hard to discern. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
Rich and the NEA both point out that “reading comprehension” remains one of the top skills in demand for well-paying jobs—even if it’s not clear what kind of reading will be the most valued (scanning or scrolling, or sustained) once the employee starts. If the research on multitasking is any guide, though, and if several centuries of liberal arts education have proven anything, the ability to think clearly and critically and develop an argument comes from reading in a focused manner. These skills are important because they enable employees to step back from an atmosphere of frenzy and make sense in a busy, nearly chaotic environment. If all companies want, though, is worker bees who will simply type till they drop and badger one another into a state of overload, a new generation of inveterate multitaskaholics might be just what they get. If that’s the case, workplace productivity isn’t the only thing that will suffer.
History in the Wash
The speed we must work at in order simply to manage our correspondence has extended the disposable culture that has ruined so many parts of our globe to our own correspondence. We delete e-mails to clear space—and often our machine does it for us. Computer crashes, for those who do not use Web-based e-mail, routinely wipe out large correspondence files. Given that we are having conversations via e-mail that once occurred over the telephone—which no one but the most paranoid recorded—these eclipses are in keeping with how much was lost to time, anyway. Many people are sending e-mails rather than letters, though, and letters were kept, treasured, archived. Not preserving such correspondence will lead to a terrible loss.
Family histories depend to a large degree on letters; they create a sense of continuity, tell us things loved ones could not share—or had forgotten—in their lifetime, and are one of our last remaining physical contacts with the presence of our ancestors. There is nothing quite as posthumously intimate as handwriting. It’s why we rummage. Letters that emerge from the dust of attics and lockboxes are like time capsules; they preserve the concerns and worries and passions of our loved ones at the moment they were written. Novelists know the power of these words. Some of the earliest works of fiction were epistolary tales. In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Poor Folks, we follow the story by reading the letters of characters. We know things about them that are so private they can be put only into letters.
Even if e-mails are preserved, though, they may not tell us as much as letters. The way the medium conditions us to write will also pose a problem for future historians. “In our age when diaries are no longer regularly kept, when letters are rare between lovers and friends, the only hope for future historians will be email,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin, the biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kennedys. “Yet, compared to handwritten letters in the old days, in which the writers often poured their most intimate thoughts, the more staccato form of e-mail will be nowhere near as valuable. There is also the fear that when a couple breaks up, for instance, they will simply delete whole files, which was less likely when handwritten letters were retained in old boxes and stored in attics for generations.”
We are making history faster than we can preserve it. In The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille described how the race to preserve archives and collections often overlooked the fact that new methods of preservation were actually inferior to what they were replacing, like that old piece of clay that has housed a love poem for four thousand years and running. “In fact, there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness of technology and its fragility,” he writes. “The clay tablets that record the laws of ancient Sumer are still on display in museums around the world. Many medieval illuminated manuscripts written on animal parchment still look as if they were painted and copied yesterday. Paper correspondence from the Renaissance is faded but still in good condition while books printed on modern acidic paper are already turning to dust. Black-and-white photographs become unstable within forty or fifty years. Videotapes deteriorate much more quickly than does traditional movie film—generally lasting about twenty years. And the latest generation of digital storage tape is considered to be safe for about ten years, after which it should be copied to avoid loss of data.”
These issues are not just important for archives; they are essential to government, for gaps in the record can enable an administration to effectively rewrite history. Following President Nixon’s raid on White House phone tapes, the U.S. Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, mandating the preservation of all presidential records. But the age of e-mail has created new loopholes—it’s easier than ever to lose, delete, or write over existing records. In the 1980s, the administration of President Ronald Reagan sought to destroy records from an early electronic messaging system; in the end, it was blocked by a court. The Clinton administration also became ensnarled in a legal battle relating to its failures to pres
erve electronic records. In the end, the White House e-mails had to be reconstructed at a cost of several million dollars.
No administration lost quite as much mail as the George W. Bush administration, though—a double standard if ever there was one, given that it also peered into e-mail more invasively than any other U.S. administration to date. In 2007, it was discovered that e-mails of high-level staffers involved in the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys had gone missing. It was also discovered that the Bush administration had encouraged many of its staffers to use a domain provided by the Republican National Committee (RNC), “in some instances… specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications,” according to the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Henry Waxman. The RNC had no e-mails archived for fifty-one of the eighty-eight officials who had such accounts, which were apparently used to discuss policy. Karl Rove, the president’s notoriously wily adviser, claimed to have used the RNC domain for 95 percent of his e-mail.
This was not the first or last time that White House e-mail turned up a blank during George W. Bush’s presidency. When special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, he discovered that e-mails were not always backed up. In May 2008, the Bush administration admitted in court that it had lost three months of e-mail from the initial months of the Iraq War thanks to a system upgrade. Facing a lawsuit by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group that focuses on uncovering classified documents, the administration also said the earliest date on e-mails was May 23, 2003, the day the United Nations gave official approval for the occupation of Iraq. All told, between 2003 and 2005, the Executive Office of the President lost more than 5 million e-mails.
The Explosion of Now
What we are experiencing in the twenty-first century is a shift in the space-time continuum as radical as the one brought about by the creation of simultaneity by the telegraph and the institution of standardized time. Prior to the development of e-mail and the use of e-mail before and after work to keep up with matters not resolved during the workday, one had to actually call a coworker at home to keep a project churning, and the invasiveness of making that phone call helped to reinforce an essential boundary between public and private space, between work and leisure time, between family priorities and business priorities.
We have a new now, a now that doesn’t care about time zones or distance, a now that is muscularly, aggressively rearranging our lives and circadian rhythms because, unlike people the world over in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we are plugged into the network, which connects us more than ever. In the past, very ambitious businessmen, world leaders, and telegraph operators were obliged to field messages coming in over the wireless at night. Now that requirement has expanded massively—we need that update from the Sydney office, the markets are open in Hong Kong, checking in gives us a jump on the day, erases the lag time that the scope of the world’s physical dimensions has until recently made all but insurmountable. The corporation never sleeps.
Globalization has been with us for centuries now, but the use of technology such as mobile phones, voice mail, and e-mail has physically corralled us into the same sleepless pool. In this environment, those who can go without are demigods, paragons of hard work and mind over matter. Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Margaret Thatcher were and are renowned for their ability to push on into the wee hours. “Sleeping as little as possible is viewed as a badge of honor here,” says Dr. Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago. An NPR story in 2008 brought forward one of the classic examples of a power broker’s attitude to snoozing: In the film Thank You for Smoking, the main character, Nick, a public relations flack for the cigarette industry, receives a phone call from a Hollywood poobah late at night. “Do you know what time it is in Tokyo?” the Hollywood man quips, saying yes, of course he’s in the office. “It’s the future!” “When do you sleep?” Nick asks. “Sunday!” the mogul replies.
Trying to keep up, the rest of us suffer. Insomnia and chronic sleep deficit have become something of an epidemic in the United States. Americans are sleeping on average one less hour than they did just twenty years ago, and our caffeinated, constantly connected infotainment culture is to blame. “All of these lifestyle changes are directly impacting not only the number of hours Americans sleep each day, but also when during the twenty-four hours that sleep occurs,” says Carl Hunt, the director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research in Bethesda, Maryland. And we may be able to work into the wee hours, but it’s not efficient—it simply extends the hours we need to work in order to get things done. Among Americans aged eighteen to thirty-four, 50 percent say that daytime sleepiness affects their work. These circadian blips are costing U.S. companies $50 billion a year, according to some estimates.
It’s not just our rest that suffers, though. Living in a perpetual now alters our perception and arguably makes it impossible to grasp the dimensions of our lives and our world, since our attention has constantly to be oriented to the task at hand. This means that in the so-called age of information we are constantly making decisions based on a limited, improperly grasped frame of reference—in other words, on faulty information. In The Dimension of the Present Moment, the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub relates a common experiment in which a subject is presented with a brief sound or light signal and is then asked to reproduce it. If the signal lasts for just two seconds, the subject always overestimates its length, creating a reproduction that is longer. If the signal played to the subject is three seconds long, then the reproduction is accurate.
The symbolic and psychological ramifications of this experiment are enormous, especially in an era in which we are constantly required to interact in the present moment—when we have turned an asynchronous tool like e-mail, one that, technically, doesn’t require two people to be present in the same moment—into a rapid-fire messaging system that gives us constant and permanent access to everyone we know. E-mail may give us the sense that we are all together now, but science tells us that we are all still living on slightly different senses of time, just like the people living in between major time stops on the American railroads before the dawn of standardized time. “We live permanently removed from and critical of our own past,” Holub writes, “permanently removed from and in the hopes of the oncoming future.” We are also increasingly cut off from parts of the world that are considered out there.
The Digital Divide
The truth remains that it’s not just nature that is lost on e-mail; it’s the true collective. Marshall McLuhan, the so-called godfather of the wired generation, coined the term “global village” forty years ago, when ARPANET was becoming a reality, yet that term remains a dream, not a description. Many groups remain stubbornly untouched by—or unmoved by—the so-called Internet revolution. The elderly, for instance, do not use the Internet or e-mail much. In the European Union, age and education remain determining factors for whether or not people use e-mail and the Internet. A survey conducted in 2004 revealed that people aged sixteen to twenty-four were three times as likely to use the Internet as those aged fifty-five to seventy-four; the same ratios divided those with lower and higher educational levels. Income also plays a factor. In Canada in 2007 a survey showed that 91 percent of people who made $91,000 or more regularly used the Internet; only 47 percent of those who made $24,000 did so. Between 2007 and 2008, the number of Americans who had broadband connections rose from 47 to 55 percent, but none of this growth came from poor populations, even though broadband costs were nearly 5 percent less than they were in 2005.
It’s not hard to see why the poor aren’t nearly so connected. Most libraries in the Western world have computer terminals now, but the hours of operation are not convenient for people who work during the day—or work two jobs, as many of the poor must in order to make ends meet. Most workplaces are connected, but that’s not true for service jobs—where a great deal of lower-income people w
ork—at fast-food restaurants, or in retail stores. Their employees need to be out on the floor selling or flipping burgers or cleaning out plastic booths cluttered with trash. It’s actually against these companies’ interest for their workers to have Internet access. The same goes for factory and manual labor jobs. Migrant workers do not have computer labs at their “place” of work; neither do millions of people the world over who work in sweatshops, mines, canneries, and sawmills and on road repair crews and short-order cook lines.
Nations, the renowned historian Benedict Anderson argued, are imagined communities. They function based on the agreed idea that people who live in the same geographic area or occupy a similar group can remain in that group without ever meeting face-to-face. “Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” So a dog walker in Portland, Oregon, and a ditch digger in Portland, Maine, are both Americans—and can both identify as such—and need not see or communicate with each other in order to agree upon that fact.
The Internet is the largest imagined community ever built. But it is also as closed as, if not more so than, the imagined community of nations. For to be online you need money. You need a job that provides a computer, or you must own one; you must possess computer literacy, which isn’t always available for people who drop out of school or do not get schooled at all. It also helps if you have people online with whom to write or send messages—so a group’s reluctance to go online, say certain populations of seniors, reinforces itself. In many cases, particularly in the world’s poorest countries, as much as Internet use and communication would help them, there are far more pressing concerns, such as simply having enough to eat. In 2008, only 5 percent of Africa’s population was online.
