http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=91639&is_large=true

Keen argues that the internet is “destroying culture”, and goes into detail during a debate with Emily Bell from The Guardian,

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/take_two/2007/08/andrew_keen_v_emily_bell.html

I don’t think you’d necessarily agree with him, but he does talk about similar issues raised in our discussions here.

http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/

I have to agree with Mark that the undermining of intellectual property is nothing to regret, and we’re only seeing the beginning as far as books are concerned. So few people make a living out of writing books. Surely no-one with a clue thinks writing books is likely to sustain them as a job, unless you treat it like a job and write books for the market like a freelancer, and even then you’re probably about as well-off as an office temp. Only a small and lucky minority will make a career writing what they want to write. I don’t think many writers are rational calculators who will stop writing just because they don’t make much money out of it.

As for local businesses… I can’t see what good lamenting them will do. Capitalism is constantly undermining small capital; the unusual thing here is the potential for decommodification. (At any rate for now a lot of secondhand shops are actually getting a new lease on life by sites like abebooks – because they now serve a market which can search worldwide for particular books, they can mark up prices in a way they never could when they had to aim at randoms walking into the store.)

One further thing to add about the decline of the local bookstore and the rise of the internet is the phenomenon of Amazon, of course. The internet has not only made many industries virtual, it has also enabled an incredible centralisation that has destroyed local business cultures of many different kinds. Books are just one example of this. So while one part of the decline of bookstores is due to less reading, another big part is the rise of Amazon and the other giant bookstores like Barnes and Noble. So we have both a centralisation of culture, and a centralisation of the economies driving (more optimistically, one might say enabling) culture.

I think this is lamentable on both counts. And I think the transition from longer-form to more internet-friendly texts is lamentable. And I think the idea of a post-textual culture is downright frightening. Let me say a few words about this. Before I do, I should point out that there was yet one more interesting Harper’s article (actually a sort of roundtable) recently, relevant to Gareth’s remarks about the rise of video games: “Grand theft education: Literacy in the age of video games”. (I needn’t mention that I think Harper’s is essential reading, but I should mention that I can send these articles to anyone who’s interested in reading them).

What can I say to articulate why I think all of the trends I mentioned are lamentable? I’m tempted to go straight for what I call in my dissertation the Louis Armstrong defense, after his famous reply to a question inviting him to define jazz—“Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know” (I put that in quotes, but a quick search turns up a million variants). It’s hard to know where to start. Some random thoughts of some values of long prose: the massive and detailed role of the imagination in interacting with long textual works (as an aside, this is also why avant garde music has always been better than mainstream music, but that is a rant for another time), the inherent suitability of text to building an argument, the way engaging with complex texts better enables us to communicate with one another, the brand of sheer aesthetic joy that can only be produced by an encyclopaedic novel (I’m nearing the end of Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot and so am carrying the feeling of aesthetic epiphany around with me day to day right now). I’m not even sure these are the central things to be said. But, as suitable for this medium, they were the first to come to my mind.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/downloads/pub/Policy%20and%20Research/BBFC%20Video%20Games%20Report.pdf

-G

PS: Just for the record, that’s 107 pages… ;-)

PPS: I just realised there were more than two comments on this page. i.e., I didn’t realise Mark had raised Marxism and I wasn’t actually alluding to that when I talked about ‘the bourgeoise’. Personally I don’t dig Marxism that much but the shared language is useful for illustrating a point.

It’s great to read some interesting debate here. Ironic in a way. Perhaps we should rather write snail mail letters to each other, or publish papers on the subject in journals only read by a few obscure academics :-)

“Although enthusiastic gamers may be more numerous amongst boys than girls, almost all children have some familiarity with games. It may be, as one professional proudly claims, that more children know how to play games than know how to read.
‘The last research the BBC did, the percentage of children between five and 10 who game, both boys and girls, is 100%. Game literacy is now higher than actual literacy at that age.’”

Whether we like it or not this trend is going to continue. Personally I think it’s just part of the natural change of media use. Literature has held prime place for a long time and has produced a profound effect upon the way we live our lives, some obviously laudable and others perhaps more insidious – control of the printing press lends the appearance of authority, which benefits the bourgeoise and particularly the corrupt bourgeoise.

All media have individual affordances and constraints, they all affect us in different ways. There is a hell of a lot of crap on the internet, but then who’s to say that creating a space for public discourse is such a bad thing? Perhaps after a while of all this jibber-jabber we as a culture will come to an equilibrium again where both literature and new media have their own space within the same ecosystem.

I enjoy reading books. That’s how I consume most of my academic work. I also enjoy reading websites, but that’s a different kind of food.

At the city where I go to college, there is a large mall. Last time I went there I found out their one bookstore closed down last year. Back home, the same thing happened to our mall – the one bookstore there was, waldenbooks, closed down. And I don’t live and study in the middle of nowhere, these are upstate NY and CT. Maybe these samples are not representative of the whole – but the article makes me think that they are.

I can see a scenario in which the ‘online book revolution’ will never come about not because of property laws, but because there will not be enough demand.

I think my original point was a Marxian point that the technological capacity of our society suggests a different form of socio-political organisation, and that the current organisation of society is a brake on our creative capacities.