Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s an essay on Salon this week entitled “The readers strike back,” which is about how — thanks to the Internet — more and more readers are writing to, and voicing their opinions about, writers. The subtext of the article is that they wished all of these troublesome readers would shut up and gratefully accept the manna from heaven that Salon writers deliver. And while Salon grudgingly acknowledges that some of its readers out there are sane individuals who send thoughtful comments and feedback, it also says that there’s a “large numbers of fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts” who insist on contributing to the discussion. While this may indeed be the case, if it’s the truth — and that this group is part of their readership — then of course nothing can really be done about this (as James Joyce said of his characters, “Here comes everybody”; the same goes, it seems, for Salon’s readers). Salon would love to not have to worry about (or listen to) their readers, opting for a more halcyon time when the information super-highway was a one-way street and their readers were page-viewed but not heard. But thanks to the tenets of Web 2.0 (such as interactivity, blogs, wikis, and user-generated content), the genie is out of the bottle — as is the audience — and there’s no getting it back in.

From the essay: “Until the Internet came along, actual readers barely dented a writer’s consciousness. Before the whole world got wired, the only way readers could respond to a piece was by writing a letter to the editor, or (much less frequently) to the author, putting it in a stamped envelope, and sticking it in a mailbox. As a result, the number of letters was a tiny fraction of what it is in the age of e-mail. And that number was further diminished by an editor who trimmed the few selected letters to meet space considerations and winnowed out the cranks. An article might have been read by 10,000 people, but the writer never knew it. A dozen letters constituted a deluge…Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed. Pieces that in the olden days would have garnered five or six letters suddenly inspired more commentary than a rerun of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ in a cultural studies class. The floodgates opened, and in charged the masses — some filled with fulsome praise, others waving scimitars and dragging siege machinery into place, others ranting about their ex-wives.”
The readers strike back