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Over at edge.org they're debating whether War and Peace matters any more, in this age of infinite information. After all, people just don't have time to focus on anything longer than a Twitter message.
It's an interesting question, underlining the need for bit literacy - the skill to thrive amidst an avalanche of data. Ultimately the law of supply and demand will hold true: those few who know how to read - not just scan a feed on Twitter or Facebook, but read - will build a strong intellectual foundation.
In an age of breadth, depth will be rare and valuable - and rewarded.
P.S. Twitter has arrived on Main Street with a front-business-page story in USA Today.
Update: The NYT, on July 27, published Online, R U Really Reading? about how the Internet changes how adolescents are reading (or not).
Interesting: having owned a copy of War and Peace for two years, it's not until a friend of mine put a plan together to read war and peace in a year on his blog - each day, he blogs the next chapter - that I've found time to start reading through it.
And now I'm hooked, and can't wait to get through it!
Wow. Heady stuff over there. Long-winded, big words, huff and puffing.
No action.
Academics true to form. Used to be like that. Now I say, don't argue about whose words characterize the problem more successfully. Instead approach it like a problem to be solved as a team. Attack the problem, not each other. Sheesh, get over yourselves.
Exactly, cafedave. Asynchrony is the beauty of the Internet. Why focus on getting people to hold a huge book in their hands and read it in (what it seems like they're suggesting) one sitting.
Give people a Kindle, serialize books selling them by the chapter, let them get the payoff in their own way.
That's the other beauty of the Internet. Everybody can have it their own way. Not everybody has to be an elite academic to "get" culture. Of course, they never have... hmm.
Peace.
Serialized Russian Literature......I seem to remember the original publications of those great books were in some periodical format....what is old is new again