When I spoke to my aunt Sue (a faithful follower of this unfortunately sparse blog) earlier this week, she said something along the lines of: “Reading? What about all the new kinds of writing people do with the internet?”

She did not mean “writing” in the (I would argue, stretch-y) sense that the new literacy people mean it: clicking on hyperlinks = creating one’s own path through a text = “authoring” it. Sue meant emails, blogs, facebook messages, tweets, chatting, etc.

In the time before the ascent of email, there was the telephone. As phone calls, especially long-distance calling, became cheaper and cheaper, the need to write letters declined. The easiest way to get in touch with someone, whether across town or across the country, was to pick up the phone. Sue pointed out that 15 or even 10 years ago, adults who had finished their schooling and who didn’t have to write as part of their jobs, just didn’t write. Maybe a grocery list, maybe a note here or there, but not sustained prose of any sort. And they definitely did not write for pleasure.

Then came the internet. Now Sue and my parents and many of their peers find that the easiest way talk to someone isn’t to talk to them at all but to write to them. Being finished with school no longer means being finished writing.

When I asked Sue if she sees writing emails or posting on a blog or commenting on a news article as really writing, she explained that even if she is not creating a formal document of some sort, the mere act of stopping to compose words into a message is different from speech. Writing an email, as opposed to making a phone call, requires an awareness of the form rather than just the content.  An email-writer must pay some attention to spelling (at least enough for spell check to recognize the word) and has to have some awareness of the message’s clarity and possible interpretations, since the recipient is not present for instant feedback.

Far from the warnings that technology is leading to a crisis in literacy, Sue feels that technology has reintroduced writing (and the pleasure of writing) to a whole crop of people who may have been consumers of written language, but were rarely producers. While much research on new media and literacy has focused on a school-age population,  has anyone looked the impact of new media on the reading and writing practices of older adults? Maybe Sue is right – maybe new media is not only not destroying the written word, perhaps it is creating a new population of  life-long writers.

I spent the first few days of my spring break up in Portland, where my laptop came in handy for writing a book review and finding our hotel. When we left Portland and headed back south, the computer was relegated to its case in the trunk, where it stayed as we spent the last few days camping in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Yesterday, however, having hiked  some and waded around in a creek and watched Dave try to catch trout and examined my legs for signs of poison oak and purified more water and set up the stove, I started thinking about the articles I had to read for Writing and Technology (Aunties, read: my monday evening class, for which I write this blog). Their pdf’s sat on my desktop waiting to be opened, read, and highlighted.

The picnic table was sunny and inviting, Dave was up the river somewhere, and it would have been a perfect time to sit and read awhile, but something stopped me. Something about pulling out my laptop in the middle of the forest just felt wrong. I wished I had printed the articles or that the assignment had been part of a book. Even though there was not another person for miles to see me, I could not bring myself to take my computer from its case in the trunk.

I sat staring at the car for several minutes, trying to convince myself of all the ways in which reading on my laptop was no different from reading in a book.

“Its still reading…. still the same solitary act, suitable for the quiet of the forest… Its not like I’m checking email or something…And the trees probably like it more, right, since I didn’t have to kill any of them to do it.”

But to no avail. It just felt like a transgression. A nature faux pas.  I sat there a while longer thinking of all the work I would have to do when I got home, but instead of opening the trunk, I put the keys back in my pocket and went to slosh up the river in search of Dave.

So now, here I sit, wishing I had done this reading before today, but thats what I get for sticking to my camping guns. That and a serious case of poison oak.

In May of 2006, a friend suggested something revolutionary. Maybe, she said, if instead of buying cheap sunglasses in anticipation of when I would drop/abandon/forget/lose/leave/smash them, I bought expensive sunglasses, I would think twice before I dropped/abandoned/forgot/lost/left/smashed them. So I bought sunglasses that cost $135 – 10 times as much as the most expensive pair I had ever purchased before. And you know, it worked. I guarded those things with my life. And not only that, when I wore them, I felt glamorous and sophisticated and beautiful.

I was reminded of this las week when we visited the old books in the Bancroft Library.  We were looking at a book with a heavy wooden cover and thick velum pages and different colored inks. It weighed a ton and probably took months to make and was 400 years old (I think – Maggie, can you confirm?). I was sitting there thinking about how much it must have cost to produce, when Tony Bliss mentioned that this book would outlive anything we printed today by 500 years. Books from the 50s are already turning to dust, he told us. Which got me to thinking. Maybe the publishing industry is a victim of its own success. Maybe they got too good at printing lots and lots of books and making them cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Maybe the downfall of the book began not with the Kindle or the iWhatever, but when books became available to the common man. Who wants something that everyone can have? Who takes care of sunglasses that only cost $10?

I realize that I’m talking about two different things here – supply and demand, and having nice things. But the two are connected. When things are expensive and fancy and made from materials that are hard to come by with skills that not everyone has, those who posses them enjoy a profit of distinction (thanks Claire and Bourdieu). Owning books used to give one a profit of distinction. Having a personal library was a status symbol. Those who had books treasured them and those who didn’t have books desired them. We want most what do not have.

When books became cheap, they became attainable. Which, for a long time, did not matter, since although books were no longer  statements in and of themselves, they were still useful. But now, there are once again ways to read that do make a statement. Owning a Mac does or an iPhone or a kindle or an iPad tells people something about you. People want these things.

Maybe, if the publishing industry wants to save itself, it should start printing on shiny acid-free paper, with colored ink, in hardcover. Maybe if books cost $100, instead of $12, they would be sexy again. Maybe they would again be objects of desire. Maybe people would collect them again.  Maybe carrying one around would be enough to make people want to buy you a drink. It worked with my sunglasses.

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(Ok, full disclosure: I did have my sunglasses for three whole years. But then they went the way of anything desirable. Someone stole them.)

As I thought about it for a minute more, I realized that not only will I lose the kab13, I will lose all of the emails that kab13 wrote and received for four years.

I began a salvaging operation, forwarding to myself (my katie.bernstein self) all of the emails I wanted to save. And man, there were some good ones. There were the “Let’s rehash all of the things that happened this weekend” emails, and the “How do you guys think we got home last night?” emails, but there were also the “Writing from my year abroad in Italy to tell my friends about carnvale” emails, or the “Mom and Dad filling me in on news from home” emails, and even one “Dave telling me ‘I love you’ for the first time, via email” email.

Through my emails and the emails of my friends, parents, aunts, and brother, I was able to reconstruct my experience in college.  I realized that, in effect, we had all co-authored a diary of four years of my life.

As I was chatting on the phone with my aunt Sue this afternoon, she pointed out that this “diary” would not exist without the internet. If I had simply picked up the phone to call my parents or sat down in a coffee shop to recall the weekend’s debauchery with my friends, our words would be gone. But because I instead chose the “less personal” medium of email to communicate with my friends and family, I have a lasting record of our adventures and stories and how we felt about them and how we felt about eachother.

I didn’t keep a diary in college, something that I always regretted. But fortunately,  it seems that kab13 kept one for me.

I cannot, however, recall a single book that we read.

In the January/February issue of Duke Magazine, there is an article entitled “The End of Civilization as We Know It?” which contains excerpts from a panel discussion held in September on the question of the future of reading. The discussion touched on topics from libraries to literacy to Google Books to the Kindle. One panelist, Lynn Neary, who covers books and publishing for NPR, said of kindle and children’s books:

“You might be able to somehow put the picture [on Kindle], but it just isn’t the same thing as a beautifully illustrated book. And that makes me think of kids because I still say we’re not going to be reading Goodnight Moon to kids on electronic readers. Some kids, the most avid readers probably, are going to fall in love with the look and the smell and the feel of a book. And they’re always going to feel sentimental about that, and they’re always going to love that as an object and a place that they’re going to want to go back to.”

For me, as a three year old, it was the “look and the smell and the feel” of books that drew me in, that made me want to hold and possess books, keep them clean and safe. It was not the experience of decoding the text or even listening to someone else decode it, but the whole sensory experience of reading that  I loved. Which makes sense. Children experience the world through their senses. They touch things. They put things in their mouths. They love the smell of their mother’s pillow and of their teddy bear’s face. It was for this that I loved books long before I could read them. And that love endured long after I moved on to books without pictures and shiny pages.

Books are still things that I want to own and keep and treasure. Reading is still something I like to do with my whole body. Yes, I read on Bart to pass the time, but when I’m home, I like to sit in a certain chair, with a cup of tea and a blanket and the dog. I like to put on the lamps, instead of the overhead lights and I like to room to be neat. What started a sensory experience continues to be one.

I have a confession to make. On the first day of our class, encountering the Harris book for the first time, I picked it up and, before reading a single word, gave the pages a good long sniff.

In my opinion, as long as there are children who encounter books for the first time as a whole body experience – who connect reading to a certain way of sitting, a certain smell, the certain feel of the weight of a book – there will be adults who continue to read books, rather than kindles.

Lynn Neary continued:  ”I think that bodes well for the future of reading.”

“In earlier times, people in literate societies had two ways of communicating with one another: either face to face (through the immediacy of speech) or at a distance in time and space (using writing). The rules of engagement were clear. You directly encountreed the person with whom you were speaking, but not the one to whome you were writing. With only minor exceptions (such as passing a note to a co-conspirator), there was no middle ground.

“Over the last century, developments in telecommunications have made possible new technologies that bend the presuppositions of spoken and written language. We speak on the telephone, but at a distance, and without seeing our interlocutor. We send written messages (once by telegraph, later by fax) that travel in near-real time…For a growing number of us, the most useful telecommunications device is email, which conveys messages written at a computer keyboard, again, in near-real time.”

This reminded me of something odd I used to do in college, when Instant Messanger was at the height of its popularity. As I would sit at my desk, half-studying half-chatting via IM with friends at different colleges or across compus, my roommate, sitting less than 5 feet away from me, would occasionally send me an instant message, or “IM” (the verb) me. She might ask if I wanted to go to dinner or just send a smiley face or a remark about something funny from the weekend. And rather than turning to her and replying verbally, I’d IM her right back.

Even though I don’t really ‘chat’ anymore, sometimes when my roommates and I are all sitting around in the same room working on our computers, I’ll send an email to one of them, either to distract him or tell him something that I don’t want everyone to hear. I might do the same thing when I’m working near a friend in the library and I don’t want to make noise.

Last month, an old friend came to visit. One night, we stayed in, got drunk on red wine, and – passing a single computer back and forth – exchanged ridiculous messages on one-another’s Facebook ‘walls.’

What does this do to the notion of “face-to-face communication?” We were sitting face-to-face (or at least side-by-side) in all four scenarios, but we were using the computer/internet to mediate the conversation rather than our voices. Is this the modern replacement for note-passing?

At 26, I’m an old fogey as far a technology goes, and if I have engaged in these face-to-computer-to-face interactions, I can’t imagine what my 17-year-old cousins do. Hmm, maybe Harris wasn’t over reacting in his predictions for writing’s precedence in the technological age…

In 1962, my mother was 10 years old and she and her 4 sisters honestly believed that, with the US space program underway, people would soon really live like the Jetsons. For hours after each episode, they debated the perks and the pitfalls of their future lives in space.

When I read Harris’s postscript about writing and computers, it made me feel like I was sitting in on my mother’s conversation about what life in space would be like. In 1995, when Harris wrote Signs of Writing, Windows ’94 had just come out, changing the way people interacted with their computers; AOL and chatting were gaining popularity, adding a new way for people to interact with other people;  it only makes sense that Harris would extend the idea to new ways of interacting with writing.

However, I don’t see the changes that Harris predicted as happening in the fast and far-reaching manner he described. Take his thought about computers and the writer/reader dichotomy. Harris imagined that the ability to search for specific terms or ideas would allow readers to parse apart a text in such a way that they could, in effect, write it differently. They would no longer be obliged to read a text in the order the writer intended it to be read. This harkens back to our discussion of using computers to “find the point” faster. Searching allows us to quickly find a piece of information – be it “the point” of an article or Abe Lincoln’s birthday or the year that the Jetson’s first aired – that we might have otherwise had to manually (ocularly?) scan for. But I don’t see that as re-writing the text. Even 15 years after Harris wrote this book, if people are genuinely interesting in something, they still read it sequentially, as the author intended. Whether its a friend’s blog or a story on the New Yorker website, when we enjoy reading something, we don’t search for the point or skip to the quotations.

As for the final paragraph, I imagine that in 1995, Harris was looking at books and magazines and seeing that they could exist on the computer. I picture him looking at email and seeing that it could replace mail. And perhaps with the new chat room/instant messenger technology, he saw face-to-face or phone-to-phone, real-time, oral communication as something that could be replaced too. Again, I think he was getting into the Jetson mentality. People still value hearing each other’s voices and seeing each other’s facial expressions. A great piece of evidence is the creation of skype and other video-chatting technologies, which evolved AFTER instant-messenger-style chatting did.

And aren’t classes in school and book groups and the discussion we are going to have in class tomorrow also just “oral commentary on what writing has created?” What’s the difference between what people have been doing for 100s of years (in discussing literature, talking about the news, and sharing the content of letter) and the “radical reversal of roles” that Harris talks about?

Maybe its because I’ve spent my adult life in a world with computers… Or maybe Harris would feel differently today about where computers have taken writing…

So, when you go back to read what your diary from 10 years ago says, even though “you” are reading it, you are reading it with a different world-view than the “you” who wrote it. This is why it seems completely hilarious and ridiculous to me now that, at age 9, I wrote that I hated my mother’s guts, because she wouldn’t let me puffy-paint a perfectly good sweatshirt with my neighbor. Or that, at age 15, I thought I was going to die from a broken heart because Glenn Moulder didn’t “like-like” me.

But reading those words that I wrote such a long time ago doesn’t only make me laugh at Katie-prime, nor does it simply refresh my memory of those events. Reading my own words brings me back to an old way of looking at things and reminds me how I used to see myself and the world. So, yes, I agree with Harris that a diary can be a memory aid, but I would add that it does not just serve to record events and experiences, but that each entry documents the entire word-view of the “you” that wrote it.

As an aside, following this logic, one could also keep an oral diary using a recording device and not be called crazy for talking to oneself.

Hope that helps! Love,

Katie