Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Earlier this week, Doris Lessing delivered her acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for fiction (though not in person; the speech was delivered by her publisher). The speech has now been published in its entirety online (you can read it here in four languages.) And while not as focused as some of the other great speeches that come to mind (such as Faulkner’s, with the rousing sign-off: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail), Lessing makes some interesting comments.

Of course, she also makes a few curmudgeonly missteps. For instance, Lessing states that both writers and writing “do not come out of houses without books.” Lessing then goes on to relate the literary awakenings found in the speeches of past Nobel-prize winners:

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1,500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition

And while it stands to reason that men and women who came of age during the period of what we may end up calling “Literature 1.0” will have a very print-based view of things, the “Tradition” as Lessing describes it is changing in real and profound ways. Indeed, she laments this in her speech, saying that we currently live in a “fragmenting” culture, and that “it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

Here Lessing makes a huge mistake; she makes it sound like people who spend time with computers are all just staring at nothing but circuits, wires and plastic. Instead, people spend their time using their computers to learn about a variety of topics (including, of course, books). And they’re not just learning; they’re also contributing, interacting, and participating (things that were hardly possible in the world of Lessing’s “Tradition”).

Instead, today’s Digital Natives are forging and creating their own traditions. Indeed, as James Joyce (a great writer who never had the chance to win a Nobel; my mind reels wondering what his acceptance speech would look like) wrote at the end of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The same way that Dedalus and countless others like him created their own worlds and works of art, so too will upcoming generations shatter and remake our age-old Traditions to fit their new world. And, one day — perhaps soon — both writers and writing will indeed come “out of houses without books.” But, I guarantee you, they won’t come out of houses without computers.

Last week there were a pair of blog postings, by Leslie Johnson and Siva Vaidhyanathan, on what was being described as an “oversimplification” of generational tags. The main thrust of each argument was that many people — including me — were being too general when it came to classifying upcoming generations as Digital Natives (let alone, as I do in Print is Dead, naming them Generation Download and Generation Upload). This did not sit well with either Johnson and Vaidhyanathan. For instance, here’s Vaidhyanathan on the subject:

Invoking generations invariable demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, electronics, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It always excludes immigrants, not to mention those born beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior.

Here’s Johnson:

I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist comments about how older faculty are completely non-digital and all students are automatically all digital. Hah! Just like some folks have an interest or skill in languages or math or art and some folks don’t, it’s the same with whatever “digital” is.

In fact, Johnson goes so far as to claim that “Being digital is not generational.” Well, I might agree that being digitally adept maybe isn’t generational, but there’s no way you can say that kids today aren’t Digital Natives. It’s a fact. From the moment they’re born (under the watchful electronic eye of digital cameras and camcorders, not to mention the bevy of beeping medical equipment nearby), to every aspect of their ensuing lives (electronic baby monitors, video games, cell phones, digital watches, TVs, MP3s, the Internet, etc.), they will exist in an electronic milieu.

A hundred years ago, kids who were born were Generation Victrola; today they’re Generation Download. To argue against this is to swim against the tide of not only history but common sense. Because generations are defined by the world in which they’re born and nurtured. Whatever surrounds that generation is later what comes to define it. Because of this, someone could be said to have grown up in the era of Vietnam even though they didn’t fight in Vietnam, or never even gave it much thought. But the influence that Vietnam had on the books and music and movies of the time is resolutely inescapable.

Vaidhyanathan points out that just because someone was born within the accepted timeframe of what constituted Generation X, it doesn’t mean they had the same experience. With that I completely agree. Just because you were born in 1972 doesn’t mean you’re a carbon copy of Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. Instead, stating that someone was born at that time simply means that they were exposed to the prevailing attitudes and influences which were omnipresent during those years (whether they were part of those influences or not).

But there are also more important and subtle shifts, generational gaps that both envelope and separate us without us even knowing. And, in many ways, these are the most important developments of all. For instance, last week’s tragic mall shooting. As I watched the news reports, most of which described the mall as a growing place of danger and paranoia, it caused me to reflect upon my own life and childhood. As a youth growing up in suburban Southern California in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, most of my weekends were spent at the mall, hanging out in the arcade or at the pizza place, or just wandering around for endless hours (during any of the mall scenes in either Valley Girl or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I could have been an extra). In those days, the worse thing that could happen to you in a mall was that Asteroids might eat your quarter. Today, people go to the mall and get gunned down as they shop for Christmas presents. For today’s teenagers, malls (not to mention their own schools) can be a dangerous place. For me, they weren’t. So the meaning and length between my experience and theirs is indeed a generational gap. And its exists all around us in ways that far outshine the surface differences in music, fashion, or even anything necessarily cultural.

The bottom line is that no generation marches in lockstep; no era can be defined completely (the ‘20s weren’t roaring for everyone nor did everybody swing in the ‘60s, and surely someone was pissed off during the Summer of Love). Instead, the tags we give to generations are shorthand; they’re always just signifiers. To treat them literally is to mistreat them.