I wasn’t the only one to grumble against Michael Kamil‘s boneheaded idea that schools play down fiction somewhat. Librarian Karen Schneider felt more or less the same. Should the preparation of worker drones be the main mission of schools? Far better to worry about students as humans and citizens, and not just as future fodder for GE or Exxon. The big irony, of course, is that the Gradgrind approach to reading will probably result in worse corpocrats. Narrative can help them make sense of events around them and, more importantly, is worthwhile in itself. Alas, in the Net era, it’s harder and harder to convince adults, not just children, to care about narrative, Potter excluded—one reason schools should emphasize fiction more, not less..
Mailer vs. TV commercials—and perhaps Twitteresque interruptions
Enter Norman Mailer, on the importance of narrative. I’d recommend that the Gradgrinds and Babbitts pay close attention to the points he made during a recent audio interview with Radio Open Source (best of luck, ROS, on the funding front!). Whether or not you agree with Mailer’s politics and lifestyle, he is right on target here. Here’s an MP3 excerpt, and below I’ll serve up some of his comments in text:
“Democracy depends upon enough people in that country being willing to read and learn, and learn from literature, and there’s no question in my mind that children are being discouraged from reading by the commercials they watch on TV all the time…When you’re a child, at least when I was a child, the love of narrative was so important to us. [If] someone started to tell a story or we’d be reading a book, the idea of what came next was so important that it really began to give us a sense of how to approach the world, which was the world is a narrative. And now the world is now longer a narrative [to] the child is watching television. On the contrary. The world is a set of interruptions…stimulations and frustrations. That’s what it is for a child watching TV. They’re watching a show and and boom the commercial comes in every five, seven or twelve minutes or whatever….It shatters the desire the desire to read. We become a nation where people read less and less as the decades go by.”
Gripe against TV commercials might apply to the Twitter, too
Notice? Although Mailer is attacking the usual TV commercials, much of he says might apply to Net-based media, if you consider all the interruptions in the Twitter vein. As I see it, then, the cure is more focus on narrative. Toward this goal, e-books have an important role to play—given all the possibilities that cheaper distribution and well-used interactivity can provide (constant interactivity can be just as disruptive as the commercials). But getting books online isn’t enough. We also need them to be presented in context and tightly integrated with schools and libraries, one of the goals of the TeleRead plan, for which I see LibraryCity as a prototype. Given all the distractions that the tech world keeps inventing, I’m become more enthusiastic than ever toward dedicated e-book readers like the Sony and the forthcoming Bookeen model—so that human readers can focus on books if they want and not be Twittered away.
Detail: Twitter has its place—for, say, conferences or disaster warnings or people with a surfeit of time on their hands—but I see it as a threat to the kind of concentration helpful to book-reading. I doubt that Twitter is a mass fad in K-12; I wonder if younger children can even sign up for it. But Twitter is a good example of where we are headed–broadcasts of IMs, as opposed to the selective, person-to-person variety. Even conventional IM, when overused, can be worse than kid-loud candy commercials. Meanwhile, if nothing else, keep in mind that even with NetGen, the TV is often on—as background for reading and writing.
A qualifier: No, I’m not saying that the Net will kill off serious reading. It depends how we use it. For example, I love the idea of intelligent sites for fan fiction; when you write fiction, perhaps there is more of a chance you’ll read it, at least if someone points you in the proper direction.
Off-topic, a little: Speaking of reading and writing, here’s a recommendation if you’ve bought a Sony Reader and qualify for the Sony store’s free book offer: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, by the aptly named Francine Prose. If you qualify, go here. Thanks to Robert Nagle for pointing this title out to me; I’d been meaning to catch up ith the book anyway.
Related: Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead, from CNET. What does that mean for books? Perhaps more interruptions—from IM alerts.
