Below are Atlantic notes, from James Fallows and others, on the expected and unexpected effects of the computer revolution on our habits of thought, work, and life. The thread’s title is in honor of the seminal article largely prefiguring the modern Internet, “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, which the Atlantic published in 1945.
Yesterday I mentioned the astonishing (to me) news that, by cramming a wad of Post-it notes underneath the cover of my ailing Android Nexus 5 phone, I could save myself the significant cost and hassle of buying a new one.
Three followups. First from Jason Virga, creator of the Post-in note video that saved me so much time and dough:
When my Nexus 5 microphone first started malfunctioning, my first thought was "oh well, time to get a new phone”!
Thankfully my curiosity drew me towards tinkering around a little bit before making that new purchase. Within an hour, I figured out the problem and posted the video.
The phone is actually great, and nothing else was wrong with it. So I thought a few minutes checking under the hood couldn't hurt. Thankfully, it turned out this way, and has saved many people as you said "hundreds of dollars".
And for me helping people brings me utter joy.
And to me too!
***
Second, from a reader who operates a charter-boat company. First he talks about a similar self-help story; then, reflections on What This All Means:
Last Spring, making flank speed to get a boat ready for the upcoming season my random orbit sanders seized. One, then the other 30 minutes later. From a remote port, the nearest replacements (on a sunday) were a 3 hour round trip away.
But the Internet to the rescue. Don't remember what I googled, but in short order I was watching a bearing repacking for my sanders on Youtube. (Fine particles from sanding enter the sealed bearings, mix with the bearing grease and turn it to non-lubricating goo) I took a chance and sprayed PB Blaster (WD-40 on steroids) into the bearings,and Voila! I was back in business and the boat launched on time.
I think the internet has been disastrous for professional communications, both the profession and the communication. I really do think books, magazines, tv, movies are worse for the internet.
But it is a true golden era for amateur communication, most especially peer to peer communications like your and my day-savers.
We’re fighting off the professional-world effect here at the Atlantic, but overall the reader has a point. His emphasis on the professional/amateur difference is a useful clarification.
***
Another bit of testimony:
The internet has also saved "early adopters" like me (more than once) from our impulses to upgrade things at the earliest opportunity.
My latest impulse (and fiasco) was to upgrade my Macs (both desktop and laptop) to Yosemite right when it came out (instead of rationally waiting until bugs had been fixed and, more importantly, vendors caught up developing drivers for it). [JF note: burned long ago, I never load an operating-system update until the first “maintenance release.”]
Later that day, when I went to print something out from my laptop, nothing happened (expect a notification on the icon bar telling me an error had occurred). So I looked at the error message and, of course, it was essentially gibberish to me: Stopped - ntdcmsmac open fail:dlopen(/usr/lib/dlthm1zcl.dylib…
Of course, I immediately knew it had something to do with the upgrade, and I got the sinking feeling I would need to wait for Dell (the maker of my printer) to get around to upgrading the drivers (I went to their web site, and they hadn't yet).
Instead, I decided to poke around the internet, googling the above error and the word Yosemite, to see what I could find out. Sure enough, someone had posted a "workaround" to deal with the issue.
(Essentially, Apple beefed up the security features of the OS; in doing so, they prevented programs, etc, from copying files into certain directories. One of those directories was the one the printer driver, dlthm1zcl.dylib, was located in. On top of that, I guess it also erased the driver. And, since the drivers could no longer access the directory, you couldn't simply reinstall the drivers.
The solution was to reboot the machine into recovery mode, disable the security feature, reboot into regular mode, install the current version of the printer driver, which could now access the directory, reboot back into recovery mode, re-enable the security feature, and then reboot back into regular mode).
Worked like a charm.
And, as you said, thanks to all those willing to share their expertise with those of us who often need it!
Disaster (or challenge) for professionals, golden age for amateurs: such are our times.
In some of the installments you’ll find lower down in this thread, I mentioned both the internal and the external unintended-consequences of the shift from paper to electronic reading.
Internal: at least for me, information simply registers differently, and more deeply, from a traditional book or magazine page.
External: reading from a printed source emits social cues about what you’re doing, and the presence of print around a house affects the environment in which children grow up.
Now readers on related aspects of this shift. First, from a person who has worked for many years as a teacher, in the United States and overseas:
The idea of "concept of book" is taught in most good Ed. School classes about reading. If you don't know to read from right to left, top to bottom, and whether to start front or back, you can't work the damn thing. You and I got the training from parental exposure. There are many children who do not have "reading parents" to stack their environment with cues.
A child seeing Mom work a Kindle does not get the same cues as when Mom is reading a book or magazine.
Similarly:
Growing up, my parents had National Geographic, Smithsonian, Newsweek, among others and I would pick them up when I got bored. Other than a couple of home improvement magazines, I do not subscribe to any today. I feel like I am cheating my children of any experience.
And from this same reader, not about the effect on children but on the other social cues:
You quote a reader who would “ . . . leave [The Atlantic] around the house so when people come by they will think I am smarter than I really am."
I subscribed to The Atlantic and The New Republic in law school and would carry them with me to class and read during breaks for this exact reason.
And about reading newspapers in hard copy: You cannot beat reading the newspaper first thing in the morning, lay out each page, drink your coffee and read. I go Sports, Front Page, Local, Business and Life/Entertainment.
I am a fast reader and read close to 90% of the paper in 15 minutes. I cannot imagine reading this way online.
From a reader in Japan, on this final point on the visual/intellectual ergonomics of reading a physical newspaper:
I enjoy reading what an editor has selected as news worthy, another way of saying that what I read in a paper are often things that I would never click on at a news site, the physical click becomes a self selecting echo chamber of sorts.
I agree: on the one hand, any excursion into online media leads to clicks you hand’t expected. On the other hand, I find that looking at a physical paper — which I have begun making myself do again, because I’m convinced that the results are better — leads me to more unanticipated items of “actual news.”
***
Let’s get back to kids-and-reading. A mother of youngish children writes:
I still subscribe to newspapers, The Atlantic, and other magazines for me, but also for my own children. More than anything else, I want to turn my kids into readers.
When I was younger, the new issues of Time and US News & World Report would be on our coffee table every Monday night. My parents also subscribed to the local newspaper and the WSJ, so there was always something to read just lying around. It was just easier to read an article, than to pick up a book.
By having books, newspapers and magazine around my house, even though I also have them on my iPad and Kindle, and by having my kids see me read them, I’m hoping that by osmosis and by example, my children will pick them up as well.
They may see me on the iPad or even on the computer doing the same thing, but it’s easy to assume that I’m just catching up on Candy Crush or random websites. I hope that by reading the real thing, and having my kids see me read the real thing, they will learn to enjoy it as well. I think it’s working, but until I know for sure, I still enjoy reading news in its original format.
And back again to social cueing:
Your piece just now reminded me of a common reader's dilemma from the past. If I was reading something highbrow, academic or otherwise socially impressive, part of the joy was to read it in public - on the train, in a coffee shop etc - letting people know what an intellectual force of nature I was.
On the other hand, when I was reading something lowbrow, dumb, hyper-violent or trashy, I would often leave the book at home even though I wanted to keep reading it, because people would decide that it said something about me I didn't want them to believe/know...
Relevant to the reader’s first paragraph: when I’ve been traveling in foreign countries where I can read, or sort of read, the language, I have been similarly vain about carrying newspapers in the local language, as a “I’m not a complete tourist!” signal. Relevant to the second paragraph: as noted before, I love books from the superb Hard Case crime series. The Hard Case trademark is issuing its books in retro-1950s lurid covers, as you see at right. While I love the panache of the covers sometimes I feel that I need to cover them up. What other people subway or airplane should think is, of course, “who is that cool guy reading a retro-50s series with its campy covers?” What I’m afraid they’ll think is, “Who is that creep?”
***
Finally for now, back to the visual-memory difference between reading in a physical book, where you always know how far along you are from beginning to end, and where a given passage appears on the page. After I mentioned that these cues were important to me, a reader responds:
Hallelujah! How is it the design fanaticism of Apple still hasn't solved this problem on the iBooks app?
The position on the page still holds (mostly, though I believe I've seen times when page layout changes without changing font or size), but the inability to know where you are in a book is really annoying. Sure, you can look down at the page number, but that's nothing like the intuitive feel of a book where you just see that you're about 2/3 of the way through. Same holds for every other ebook reader I've seen.
Two more notes by readers on the how tablets, phones, and computers are changing the process of reading. Novel angle: these readers say the change may be for the good. First, from a mother of young children:
A quick observation just because I suspect that I have a minority perspective among your readership…
A kindle is an absolute lifesaver for reading when you're also trying to nurse/rock/otherwise care for a baby. The light weight means you can be reading War and Peace and still hold it up one handed for hours without getting tired, turning pages with a button instead of desperately trying to get gravity or maybe telekinesis to do it for you. And the wipeable, non-tearable screen comes in handy too. I'm sure my now-toddlers could figure out how to break the thing if they really put their minds to it, but I also know that they are naturals at trying to rip pages out of books.
To interrupt this note with an agreement: yes, of course, there are lots of cases where the lightweight, self-illuminating, no-page-turning, hold-with-one-hand aspect of Kindles, iPads, nooks, etc is a godsend. Back to the note:
Our three year old "reads" some books flipping through the pages (my elementary school teacher mother has commented on her advanced "Concepts of Book") and others sitting on her father's lap at the computer. She has inexplicable (to us) preferences for which books should be read which way. Both she and her one year old sister refer to my husband and I's e-readers as "books," so they get that we're reading when we look at them.
But there is definitely also value to the physical books we have on our shelves that she gets to page through occasionally. She likes the pictures in the cookbooks and biology textbooks, and it does seem like an important window for her into her parents' independent interests.
Between the World and Me is in our house, in hardcover, mostly because I realized I want my grandchildren to find it someday when they are sorting through my things and maybe know a little bit more about me and the point in history I lived in. But of course if that's the goal, its probably better to have one bookshelf and not a whole library.
***
Here is a longer, complex defense of non-paper reading, from someone in the tech world who also obviously knowns the pre-tech literary world. (Fluerons, like this ❧, courtesy of the reader.):
I’ve been particularly interested in the questions of (a) how one ought to choose one’s reading, and (b) how much reading one ought to do. The conventional asserts to these questions are:
(a) First read what your work urgently requires, then read whatever you feel like reading right now. Repeat.
(b) As much as you can, or as much as you can stand
These answers cannot be correct or sufficient, but thoughtful people do repeat them and claim to follow them. We have rejected things like Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan or Mortimer Adler’s Great Books, and that’s not a bad thing, but we’ve little guidance to put in their place.
❧
Which costs more in the long run: the books we buy, or the shelves we buy to store them, and the rent we pay for housing those shelves? My house, at any rate, is completely overrun with books and magazines. Ebooks are books for which I don’t need to pay rent.
I have a forty-minute commute. Audiobooks keep me from snarling at the radio, fuming at Boston’s notorious drivers, and add fifteen volumes a year to my reading. Many audiobooks are exquisitely read, and not all the best readers are famous actors; I particularly recommend Katherine Kellgren, a master of accents.
❧
To interrupt this message too: I completely agree on the subject of recorded books. I find myself remembering and absorbing these even more vividly that on-paper books. On reason is that you can’t skim or skip ahead. The story unfolds at its own pace. Back to the reader:
On the subject of electronic media and reading to kids, the expert is a recent MIT PhD named Angela Chang who wrote a dissertation on electronic books to be read to very young children — books that help parents do a better job of reading with their kids than they might do otherwise. After all, not every parent is a great reader, and even great readers may not have the foggiest idea of how to read to kids.
❧
A few years ago, I read a weblog anecdote by a father whose first daughter had recently begun to walk. At some point, she toddled across the room to the coffee table, where she found a colorful magazine. After examining the cover, she tapped it several times, turned around, and said, "Broken!"
❧
Four or five years ago, there was a huge literary fracas on the question of whether one’s living room bookshelves should be occupied (a) by the books you’ve read, (b) by the books you’re about to read, or (c) by the books you want your visitors to think you read.
When traveling, I try never to be without a book; I hate to wait in line, and travel often requires waiting. [JF: Yes, the joke saying in our family before a trip to the DMV or jury duty is, “Take a book, it will be pleasant.”] At some conferences, I do sometimes choose what I carry in order to suggest that colleagues might want to read that book, or something like it; this doesn’t work for books about the conference topic but can be very effective in adjacent fields….
❧
Kids know their parents are reading, even if they’re reading on Kindles or iPads. Kids know what their parents are reading, if they know at all, from the dinner table. Looking at the cover is a doubtful guide at best.
❧
The book’s physical disclosure of your progress through the work is often a bug, not a feature, and some of the most powerful tools in the new media arsenal take advantage of this to surprise and delight the reader. This is also an advantage of film, which can end suddenly or which can appear to be reaching its natural conclusion and then spring suddenly in unexpected directions….
❧
I’m confident that books written to be electronic and taking advantage of the medium will let us do things we couldn't do before. Much of what "ebooks" do today is simply simulating paper, but we can do much better. I’m particularly interested in painterly narrative right now — narrative where the writer controls what she knows to be right but exercises looser control over matters in which different solutions present themselves. Just as Turner and Impressionism accepted that brushstrokes had a place in painting, that they were features and not mere flaws, we might come to see ways to let the reader’s inclination, the environment, or circumstance choose amongst possible readings.
