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COMMENTARY
May 20, 2009
The printed word
The last five weeks I've been on holiday, getting as far away from it all as I could, mentally when not corporally. The reader may guess I am a news junkie; it would be a safe guess for anyone who works in newspapers. Being removed from the necessity of consulting the daily news does not cure one of the habit, however. And since a holiday isn't Lent, I wasn't planning to starve my curiosity about current events. But my wrists told me I needed a holiday from my laptop, and my eyes added that they were sick of being glared by backlit screens.I, anyway, don't watch television; succumbing to temptation not even on those rare occasions when I am myself being interviewed. For some reason I have never liked television -- actually, "reasons" in the plural, and I could list them in a book. But the dislike extends to the irrational, and were I dictator of the universe the first three things I'd disinvent would be cars, and TV. (I know, that's only two things, but as we learned from fairy tales, it is wise to reserve one's third wish.) Therefore I resolved to read only such news as I could find in print. The first thing to note is that these sources are disappearing. In particular, out-of-town papers are becoming harder to find on city newsstands, and the selection of them in the big magazine emporia gets narrower and narrower. British and European papers, where available at all, now cost an arm and a leg (plus two fingers of GST), so that the franchise managers expect you to order them specially. In five weeks I could not find a single copy of such prominent "world newspapers" as Frankfurter Allgemeine, or Corriere della Sera -- once available at any cosmopolitan kiosk -- except in public libraries, to which they are now transmitted in nasty, stapled, size-reduced print-outs. Of course, one can find these papers in a couple of keystrokes; and for a wad of electronic cash, even subscribe to the "print version" teleported through one's screen. But think this through. Quite apart from the expense, the experience of reading these glorious broadsheets in patches through a screen is different in kind from stretched out with them in a coffee shop, or even in bed. This may sound like a narrow aesthetic question -- except, aesthetic questions are seldom narrow. The whole point of the old broadsheet was to provide range and relation to the eye; to show you not only what you were looking for, but what you weren't looking for. It is like the difference between an old-fashioned bookstore where you browse, and make discoveries; and an Internet bookstore where you hunt down a book, like a rat after cheese in a maze. The New York Times used to boast, "You don't have to read it all, but it's nice to know that it's all there." That was never true; the NYT has always had an ideological filter; but it was at least a superb left-wing paper, before its mesh grew too fine. No doubt "it's all there" on the Internet, too, but you will have to look for it. And the very way you look is distractive, in the small field of quick links and blinking lights. I would observe that grey is sometimes the colour of truth. Now, it is a serious, a "civilizational" matter, when, as today, the majority of people have retreated into little hermetic cells. For most of us now get our news self-filtered, having bookmarked just those websites that will tell us what we wanted to be told. The Times of London had a delightful advertising slogan a generation ago: "Slip into something less comfortable." This is something I want from a newspaper: to be told things I didn't want to know. It is the person who has stopped up his ears and eyes who has gone farthest in "customizing" his media experience. And reading major headlines only is the next best thing. Let me say I thoroughly enjoyed, sensually, reading the papers in print-form again, including those in languages I less than half understand. And let me now add my key point. I had suspected before that people do not retain what they read on computer screens as well as what they read in print. After my five-week experiment, I am quite sure of this. Partly for the wealth of physical associations in print reading, and partly from other causes, our memories favour the tangible. We confirm this point instinctively, every time we print out a long article. This is a serious matter, for as any competent pedagogue could assure us, what is not retained was never adequately processed in the first place. So while the Internet provides a festival of information, it also subverts the comprehension of all things humane. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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