23. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 50.
24. Ibid., 49.
25. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 161.
26. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 72.
27. Quoted in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English News-books, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 187.
28. See Olmert, Smithsonian Book of Books, 301.
29. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 130.
30. Notes Eisenstein, “Reading out loud to hearing publics not only persisted after printing but was, indeed, facilitated by the new abundance of texts.” Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 328.
31. J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 101.
32. Books also introduced a new set of tools for organizing and conveying information. As Jack Goody has shown, lists, tables, formulas, and recipes became commonplace as books proliferated. Such literary devices further deepened our thinking, providing ways to classify and explain phenomena with ever-greater precision. Goody writes that “it does not require much reflection upon the contents of a book to realize the transformation in communication that writing has made, not simply in a mechanical sense, but in a cognitive one, what we can do with our minds and what our minds can do with us.” Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 160.
33. Darnton points out that the radically democratic and meritocratic Republic of Letters was an ideal that would never be fully realized, but as an ideal it had great force in shaping people’s conception of themselves and their culture. Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,” New York Review of Books, February 12, 2009.
34. David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2001), 104. The italics are Levy’s.
35. Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science, 20, no. 8 (2009): 989–99. Gerry Everding, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” Washington University (St. Louis) Web site, January 26, 2009, http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/13325.html.
36. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” Dial, October 1840.
37. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 8.
38. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 152.
39. Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 217–18.
40. Some people have suggested that communication on the Internet, which tends to be brief, informal, and conversational, will return us to an oral culture. But that seems unlikely for many reasons, the most important being that the communication does not take place in person, as it does in oral cultures, but rather through a technological intermediary. Digital messages are disembodied. “The oral word,” wrote Walter Ong, “never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived, but is natural and even inevitable.” Ong, Orality and Literacy, 67–68.
41. Ibid., 80.
a digression ON LEE DE FOREST AND HIS AMAZING AUDION
1. Public Broadcasting System, “A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Lee de Forest,” undated, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/btfore. html. For an excellent review of de Forest’s early career and accomplishments, see Hugh G. J. Aitken, The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 162–249. For de Forest’s own take on his life, see Father of the Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950).
2. Aitken, Continuous Wave, 217.
3. Lee de Forest, “Dawn of the Electronic Age,” Popular Mechanics, January 1952.
Five A MEDIUM OF THE MOST GENERAL NATURE
1. Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall 2008/entries/turing.
2. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42, no. 1 (1937): 230–65.
3. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 59 (October 1950): 433–60.
4. George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 40.
5. Nicholas G. Carr, Does IT Matter? (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 79.
6. K. G. Coffman and A. M. Odlyzko, “Growth of the Internet,” AT&T Labs monograph, July 6, 2001, www.dtc.umn.edu/%7Eodlyzko/ doc/oft.internet.growth.pdf.
7. Forrester Research, “Consumers’ Behavior Online: A 2007 Deep Dive,” April 18, 2008, www.forrester.com/Research/ Document/0,7211,45266,00.html.
8. Forrester Research, “Consumer Behavior Online: A 2009 Deep Dive,” July 27, 2009, www.forrester.com/Research/ Document/0,7211,54327,00.html.
9. Nielsen Company, “Time Spent Online among Kids Increases 63 Percent in the Last Five Years, According to Nielsen,” media alert, July 6, 2009, www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090706.pdf.
10. Forrester Research, “A Deep Dive into European Consumers’ Online Behavior, 2009,” August 13, 2009, www.forrester.com/Research/Doc ument/0,7211,54524,00.html.
11. TNS Global, “Digital World, Digital Life,” December 2008, www.tnsglobal.com/_assets/ files/TNS_Market_Research_ Digital_World_Digital_Life.pdf.
12. Nielsen Company, “Texting Now More Popular than Calling,” news release, September 22, 2008, www.nielsenmobile.com/html/press%20 releases/TextsVersusCalls.html; Eric Zeman, “U.S. Teens Sent 2,272 Text Messages per Month in 4Q08,” Over the Air blog (InformationWeek), May 26, 2009, www.informationweek.com/blog/ main/archives/2009/05/us_ teens_sent_2.html.
13. Steven Cherry, “thx 4 the revnu,” IEEE Spectrum, October 2008.
14. Sara Rimer, “Play with Your Food, Just Don’t Text!” New York Times, May 26, 2009.
15. Nielsen Company, “A2/M2 Three Screen Report: 1st Quarter 2009,” May 20, 2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/ nielsenwire/wp-content/ uploads/2009/05/ nielsen_threescreenreport_q109.pdf.
16. Forrester Research, “How European Teens Consume Media,” December 4, 2009, www.forrester.com/rb/Research /how_european_teens_ consume_media/q/id/ 53763/t/2.
17. Heidi Dawley, “Time-wise, Internet Is Now TV’s Equal,” Media Life, February 1, 2006.
18. Council for Research Excellence, “The Video Consumer Mapping Study,” March 26, 2009, www.researchexcellence.com/ vcm_overview.pdf.
19. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “American Time Use Survey,” 2004–2008, www.bls.gov/tus/.
20. Noreen O’Leary, “Welcome to My World,” Adweek, November 17, 2008.
21. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, critical ed., ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003), 237.
22. Anne Mangen, “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,” Journal of Research in Reading, 31, no. 4 (2008): 404–19.
23. Cory Doctorow, “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” Locus, January 2009.
24. Ben Sisario, “Music Sales Fell in 2008, but Climbed on the Web,” New York Times, December 31, 2008.
25. Ronald Grover, “Hollywood Is Worried as DVD Sales Slow,” BusinessWeek, February 19, 2009; Richard Corliss, “Why Netflix Stinks,” Time, August 10, 2009.
26. Chrystal Szeto, “U.S. Greeting Cards and Postcards,” Pitney Bowes Background Paper No. 20, November 21, 2005, www.postinsight.com/files/ Nov21_GreetingCards_Final.pdf.
27. Brigid Schulte, “So Long, Snail Shells,�
� Washington Post, July 25, 2009.
28. Scott Jaschik, “Farewell to the Printed Monograph,” Inside Higher Ed, March 23, 2009, www.insidehighered.com/ news/2009/03/23/ Michigan.
29. Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Digital Textbooks Can Save Money, Improve Learning,” Mercury News, June 7, 2009.
30. Tim Arango, “Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to Pass 7%,” New York Times, April 27, 2009.
31. David Cook, “Monitor Shifts from Print to Web-Based Strategy,” Christian Science Monitor, October 28, 2008.
32. Tom Hall, “‘We Will Never Launch Another Paper,’” PrintWeek, February 20, 2009, www.printweek.com/news/881913/We-will-launch-paper.
33. Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy (New York: Dutton, 2009), 43.
34. Michael Scherer, “Does Size Matter?,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2002.
35. Quoted in Carl R. Ramey, Mass Media Unleashed (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 123.
36. Jack Shafer, “The Times’ New Welcome Mat,” Slate, April 1, 2008, www.slate.com/id/2187884.
37. Kathleen Deveny, “Reinventing Newsweek,” Newsweek, May 18, 2009.
38. Carl DiOrio, “Warners Teams with Facebook for ‘Watchmen,’” Hollywood Reporter, May 11, 2009, www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/ content_display/news/ e3i4b5caa365ad73b3a32b7e201b5eae9c0.
39. Sarah McBride, “The Way We’ll Watch,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2008.
40. Dave Itzkoff, “A Different Tweet in Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral,’” New York Times, July 24, 2009.
41. Stephanie Clifford, “Texting at a Symphony? Yes, but Only to Select an Encore,” New York Times, May 15, 2009.
42. The nine hundred–member Westwinds Community Church, in Jackson, Michigan, has been a pacesetter in weaving social networking into services. During sermons, congregants send messages through Twitter, and the tweets unspool on large video screens. One message sent during a 2009 service read, according to a report in Time magazine, “I have a hard time recognizing God in the middle of everything.” Bonnie Rochman, “Twittering in Church,” Time, June 1, 2009.
43. Chrystia Freeland, “View from the Top: Eric Schmidt of Google,” Financial Times, May 21, 2009.
44. John Carlo Bertot, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, et al., “Public Libraries and the Internet 2008: Study Results and Findings,” Information Institute of the Florida State University College of Information, 2008; American Library Association, “Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2008–2009,” September 25, 2009, www.ala.org/ala/research/ initiatives/plftas/ 2008_2009/librariescon nectcommunities3.pdf.
45. Scott Corwin, Elisabeth Hartley, and Harry Hawkes, “The Library Rebooted,” Strategy & Business, Spring 2009.
Six THE VERY IMAGE OF A BOOK
1. Ting-i Tsai and Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Race Heats Up to Supply E-Reader Screens,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2009.
2. Motoko Rich, “Steal This Book (for $9.99),” New York Times, May 16, 2009; Brad Stone, “Best Buy and Verizon Jump into E-Reader Fray,” New York Times, September 22, 2009; Brad Stone and Motoko Rich, “Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold,” New York Times, December 23, 2008.
3. Jacob Weisberg, “Curling Up with a Good Screen,” Newsweek, March 30, 2009. The italics are Weisberg’s.
4. Charles McGrath, “By-the-Book Reader Meets the Kindle,” New York Times, May 29, 2009.
5. L. Gordon Crovitz, “The Digital Future of Books,” Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2008.
6. Debbie Stier, “Are We Having the Wrong Conversation about EBook Pricing?,” HarperStudio blog, February 26, 2009, http://theharperstudio.com/2009/02/are-we-having-the-wrong-conversation-about-ebook-pricing.
7. Steven Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2009.
8. Christine Rosen, “People of the Screen,” New Atlantis, Fall 2008.
9. David A. Bell, “The Bookless Future: What the Internet Is Doing to Scholarship,” New Republic, May 2, 2005.
10. John Updike, “The End of Authorship,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 25, 2006.
11. Norimitsu Onishi, “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular,” New York Times, January 20, 2008. See also Dana Goodyear, “I ♥ Novels,” New Yorker, December 22, 2008.
12. Tim O’Reilly, “Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web,” O’Reilly Radar blog, April 29, 2009, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/reinventing-the-book-age-of-web.html.
13. Motoko Rich, “Curling Up with Hybrid Books, Videos Included,” New York Times, September 30, 2009.
14. Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change.”
15. Andrew Richard Albanese, “Q&A: The Social Life of Books,” Library Journal, May 15, 2006.
16. Kevin Kelly, “Scan this Book!” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
17. Caleb Crain, “How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?,” Steamboats Are Ruining Everything blog, June 17, 2008, www.steamthing.com/2008/06/how-is-the-inte.html.
18. Some Kindle owners received a startling lesson in the ephemerality of digital text when, on the morning of July 17, 2009, they awoke to find that the e-book versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm they had purchased from Amazon.com had disappeared from their devices. It turned out that Amazon had erased the books from customers’ Kindles after discovering that the editions were unauthorized.
19. Up to now, concerns about the influence of digital media on language have centered on the abbreviations and emoticons that kids use in instant messaging and texting. But such affectations will probably prove benign, just the latest twist in the long history of slang. Adults would be wiser to pay attention to how their own facility with writing is changing. Is their vocabulary shrinking or becoming more hackneyed? Is their syntax becoming less flexible and more formulaic? Those are the types of questions that matter in judging the Net’s long-run effects on the range and expressiveness of language.
20. Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology, 31 (2005): 127–41. See also Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books,” New Yorker, December 24, 2007.
21. Steven Levy, “The Future of Reading,” Newsweek, November 26, 2007.
22. Alphonse de Lamartine, Ouvres Diverses (Brussels: Louis Hauman, 1836), 106–7. Translation by the author.
23. Philip G. Hubert, “The New Talking Machines,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1889.
24. Edward Bellamy, “With the Eyes Shut,” Harper’s, October 1889.
25. Octave Uzanne, “The End of Books,” Scribner’s Magazine, August 1894.
26. George Steiner, “Ex Libris,” New Yorker, March 17, 1997.
27. Mark Federman, “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Mrs. Smith Can’t Teach: The Challenge of Multiple Media Literacies in a Tumultuous Time,” undated, http://individual.utoronto.ca/ markfederman/ WhyJohnnyandJaneyCantRead.pdf.
28. Clay Shirky, “Why Abundance Is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog, July 17, 2008, www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr.
29. Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 218.
30. David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2001), 101–2.
Seven THE JUGGLER’S BRAIN
1. Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,” New York Times, May 25, 2009.
2. Torkel Klingberg, The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, trans. Neil Betteridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 166–67.
3. Ap Dijksterhuis, “Think Different: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Preference Development and Decision Making,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, no. 5 (2004): 586–98.
4. Marten W. Bos, Ap Dijksterhuis, and Rick B. van Baaren, “On the Goal-Dependency of Uncon
scious Thought,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44 (2008): 1114–20.
5. Stefanie Olsen, “Are We Getting Smarter or Dumber?,” CNET News, September 21, 2005, http://news.cnet.com/Are-we-getting-smarter-or-dumber/2008-1008_3-5875404.html.
6. Michael Merzenich, “Going Googly,” On the Brain blog, August 11, 2008, http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=177.
7. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: Collins, 2008), 1.
8. G. W. Small, T. D. Moody, P. Siddarth, and S. Y. Bookheimer, “Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching,” American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 17, no. 2 (February 2009): 116–26. See also Rachel Champeau, “UCLA Study Finds That Searching the Internet Increases Brain Function,” UCLA Newsroom, October 14, 2008, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-study-finds-that-searching-64348.aspx.
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