the internet and libraries · Sunday February 21, 2010
when i was young, we would spend what seemed like hours at the library. usually on Tuesday nights, right after supper, Mom would bundle us into the car with a bag of returns and drive the 20 minutes to the library next to the town hall. while there, i could feed any number of nascent obsessions or peruse the library looking for new ones. then, i could select a few to take home. at that point, i had a whole week to have that little window on the world of knowledge to myself, interrupted by chores and band practice, but always waiting patiently next to the rocking chair in the living room. i now think this disciplined relationship how i took in new ideas was central to the unbridled and unchecked development of my intellect.now that times have changed, the internet is filling that function in my life. the knowledge available has a much broader scope, but this contemporary advantage is being squandered by my stone age behavioural psychology. the internet is such a noisy medium, one with nonexistent barriers. closing a tab is a keystroke away, and getting the book down off the shelf is as easy as clicking a link. a new distraction from RSS or twitter or tumblr is similarly accessible in a fraction of a second when one is at the keys. the depth and pace which i was forced to take with library books (because, after all, if you read them all on the first couple nights, you had to wait until next week to get more!)—its missing from the interaction i now have with the influx of information from screens.
i came to this realisation earlier today when i sat in the sun with a coffee, reading articles from Instapaper on my iPhone. Instapaper, for those of you who dont use it, is a web app for saving articles you find. it installs a bookmarklet (a short javascript command you run while visiting a page) in your browser, with the simple default title "Read Later". not "read right now", not "close the tab and forget it", but "read later". clicking this button magically deposits a copy of the article, stripped of all the ads and story tools and so on, into your folder on the instapaper website. you can access this via the web, or more usefully from the instapaper app on your iPhone. the developer has even jury-rigged a way to get it onto the Kindle. i mention this software because its a wonderful virtual brake to put on the whizzing pace of digital information as it comes by. its best for long articles, and is great for commuting. you can assemble your own magazine every night from any number of sources, and keep them to read at your own pace on the train or the bus.
thus, being able to read some articles in the sunshine this morning, and in particular one by Larry Lessig centred on re-securing copyrights in documentaries after their initial release and the Google Books lawsuit, made me think of how important libraries are, and were, and how we're rushing to have technology replace rather than enhance the role libraries have in our lives. its true—the tonnes and tonnes of paper it takes to fill a library with books (or front porches with newspapers) are best left in trees, fixing carbon dioxide. on the other hand, having that kind of physicality to the way we digest information—i think it might just suit my way of thinking a little better. lifting, sitting, anticipating, restraint, limitation.
(its interesting the idea of limitation, because really, the tweet could be like the telegraph. the medium could encourage the writer to use the space as effectively and eloquently as possible. at its best, it could be like my ideal version of Scrabble, where the best score goes not to the volume of words one crams into the available space, but how much interest and meaning the words one puts down generate.)
we all have a wealth of sources for our digital information, but since there is such a minimal physical layer, there is nothing to slow down the relentless quest to distract and satiate the intellect. if ever something seems boring—i can just shut it off. just like that.
mind you, this library concept is also reflected in a good way in wikipedia. i used to (and i dont mind admitting this) flip through a desk encyclopedia for hours. it was one which came bundled with a copy of "Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?", and it was meant to be there for when you needed to look up the meaning of clues. i, of course, would veer off-topic (oblivious to the countdown timer in the game which meant i was losing), reading about Egyptian or English nobles, Chinese dynasties and their fine pottery, Franco-Russian conflicts, German and Belgian colonisation. having a connected source of contextual information can do wonders for one's general knowledge, and in a lot of ways kids these days are insanely lucky to have it all there for free in front of them. and maybe kids these days are more sophisticated than i am.
for me at least, all that quiet contemplation of my productive youth took place without a tweet or email interrupting. without that red number appearing on tumblr. that mode of thinking i once used to be able to subsume myself into has gone, all because i now sit down in front of my screen with the internet pumping away when i have free time. and i now wonder if the lack of unstructured time to think has, bit by bit, made my creativity and drive in other areas disappear. not because i’m not inspired by the wealth of ideas around me, but because the ideas dont get the chance to shape me, or to make a lasting impression.
and so, lately, i've been happy to (ironically enough) have non-stop interventions courtesy of Merlin Mann, who via his tumblr and twitter missives reminds me (and you) to get back to work—and to do the kind of work which matters more than distractions. i think its vital for us to have the kind of time in our lives with new information that a physical space such as a library and the little atoms of information we call books can afford you, but we need to manage how we eat bits of information from the million other nagging places, and also, importantly, we have to use the free time we manage to eke out for ourselves to be productive. that doesnt have to be direct, goal-oriented productivity, but it has to not be the kind of aimless, glassy-eyed time-filling browsing that its oh so easy to do. (protip: facebook is the king of glassy-eyed, time-filling browsing. the sooner you cut it out of your life, the better.)
of course, we make this all much harder for ourselves. and we do so because we have such small barriers to these sources of varied and non-stop snippets of information, because we can let them flood in at such a rapid pace (oh, so many reblogs)—i’m not sure we’re really getting anything from them. the browsing in the quiet stacks of a library (like tall trees in the forest), the lazy, open Saturday afternoons where you could flip from page to page, from topic to topic in a desk encyclopedia. in which the content is rich, not dillettante or sophomoric. where its been edited. or (gasp) commented upon (i will not use the word "curated").
so, i’m going to make this easier on myself. i’m going to drag my ass out of my bedroom, i’m going roll back the hours of browsing. i’m going to slow things down for myself.
in short, i’m going to read—actually read— later.
what do you think?
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Fantastic piece of writing! We really are drowning in a sea of information, and no one’s stopping to ask what we’ve become.
Instapaper also looks really promising.
— Tom · Mar 3, 04:19 PM · #