Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a film from my youth called Over the Edge, which is a pretty good movie about teenage life and my generation that ranks somewhere between The Outsiders (a true classic of the genre) and Sixteen Candles (lightweight, but fun). The movie was shot in 1979 and is set in a planned community in the southwest, a desolate place where kids have nowhere to go and nothing to do, so mainly they just get stoned, have parties and get in trouble. Late in the film, at a town meeting held in a school auditorium where everyone has gathered to discuss the problem, a local businessmen talks about how the kids are ruining the reputation of the town. The parent of one of the film’s main characters begins to question this, to which the businessman says, “Your son and some of his friends are a part of this problem.” The father then fires back, “My son and his friends are a part of this goddamn town!”

I thought this the other day when I read a story in the New York Times about British teens and libraries. Entitled, “Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling,” the story, by Sarah Lyall, is about how many older Brits are upset that teens aren’t behaving themselves in the British Library. And while I’m envisioning the battle being something like the railway car scene at the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night, I think the people who are complaining about the behavior are missing a critical point: teens are actually in a library! In an age where a cell phone, Side Kick, iPhone, or laptop computer is a gateway to the world’s knowledge, and kids can access information from almost anywhere, I think it’s great that teens are still going to the library at all. In fact, the interaction that teens are having with each other in these libraries shows that, for all its marvels, there’s something that the Internet can’t do: provide face-to-face interaction. And while it’s no doubt mildly annoying to older generations, would the people complaining about the behavior of teens rather the kids were out knocking over liquor stores or holding up a Tescos at knifepoint?

True, the kids should behave themselves a bit more, but it hardly sounds like Lord of the Flies (I mean, a teen answering a cell phone, but then going outside to actually talk? That’s hardly the height of rudeness). Because if teens want to go to the library, and talk to each other, and discover words, books, authors and ideas, then the last thing that should be done is to chastise them. Also, we should resist trying to force them to act like previous generations; that was then, and this is now (another good movie about teens, speaking of). Instead, the library experience should adapt to this new generation. After all, Lady Antonia Fraser (a writer who is mentioned in the article as having to wait for a desk) is not the library patron of the future. The kids, like the ones in Over the Edge and the ones written about in the Times, are the future. And if we try to sideline them now, or make them conform to our ideas of what constitutes good behavior, all they’re going to do is rebel and recede even further from literary (not to mention polite) society. I mean, it’s their library, too. And if we can indeed get kids into a library in the first place, they shouldn’t be ssshhed. Instead, they should be shown where the books are in as loud a voice as possible.