The popular view on the threat to books is that reading in the digital age is making it impossible for people to sit in solitude with a text running to 100,000 words ‒ give or take 50,000 words ‒ and immerse themselves in it. How, after all, can anyone be expected to keep their attention away that long from the Internet and their smartphones, not to mention movies downloaded off Torrent sites, apps that let you play forever, and the demanding etiquette of replying to instant messages… well, instantly?
Actually, though, it isn’t the reading habit ‒ changed though it indubitably is ‒ that’s threatening the book as we know it. For, people are reading more than ever before. Add up all the words they consume through their social media newsfeeds and timelines, WhatsApp (or whichever their favourite messaging app is) and Facebook messages, and email, email, email – and it’s bound to total more than a dozen novels can contain.
The real problem is with writing in the digital age. Gone is the leisure to write in seclusion, unpolluted by texts, posts and status messages that the world seems intent on hurling at the writer to break her concentration. Gone too, is the empowering isolation of not knowing who one’s readers are, and of not having to be be assailed by their comments and observations – everyone’s a critic, naturally – via Twitter, Goodreads and Facebook.
In this two-way, rapidly reactive, and multidimensional environment, it’s the act of writing, and not reading, books that is threatened. Here are the five most potent threats:
Performing for an audience
Writers know too much about their readers today. The Nielsen bookscan tells them exactly how many copies of their books are sold in a given bookshop. Which means they know where their readers live, for instance. E-commerce sites provide intelligence on which time of day their books are sold the most. Readers with real names and photographs –their age, hometown, profession and favourite books all revealed in full glory – tell writers exactly what they think of their books.
The temptation to write to a known market is almost irresistible. From the time a writer could honestly claim to be writing for no specific reader – or a muse – we now live in times when such a statement is more a declaration of despair than of conviction.
Writing into a stream
Literature is increasingly being consumed within a stream of text updates, photographs, videos, and comments. The discrete, dedicated reading experience of picking up a book and looking nowhere else for amusement or information is all but dead. So, writers are being forced to adjust their output to fit into this flow rather than compelling the reader to step out of it.
But why not ignore this demand and stick to the format of the book, even if fewer and fewer people do their reading in that form anymore? The answer: the seductive power of instant recognition and the sheer width of reach. The social following that a successful writer commands ensures that posting on social media takes her poetry or prose out to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of potential readers at once. Which writer can be indifferent to this?
The need to respond at once
Writers cannot escape the real world today. Thanks to 24x7 information vigilantism on Twitter and the public obligation to rave, rant or outrage on Facebook in response to events and incidents, wardrobe malfunctions and foot-in-mouth epidemics, elections and erections, the writer is almost morally obliged to add her voice. Goodbye, thoughtful and thought-out prose, hello smart one-liner.
140 characters in search of an author
The pressure from publishers, enemies and fans to tweet is killing the writer’s ability to craft long, beautiful sentences, carrying a rich and complex thought through an aesthetically pleasing sequence of sound, rhythm and meaning. Instead, their time and effort goes on cutting words, mangling spellings, dispensing with punctuation, and even substituting "you" with "u". Great tweets, but the process rewires the brain away from writing the kind of things that make a book.
Competing with cats
This is where a writer tries to be as cute as a cat, in a million and a half different ways. After all, that’s who she’s competing with. It stokes creativity like nothing can, but it’s not the kind of purrfection you need for a book.
Actually, though, it isn’t the reading habit ‒ changed though it indubitably is ‒ that’s threatening the book as we know it. For, people are reading more than ever before. Add up all the words they consume through their social media newsfeeds and timelines, WhatsApp (or whichever their favourite messaging app is) and Facebook messages, and email, email, email – and it’s bound to total more than a dozen novels can contain.
The real problem is with writing in the digital age. Gone is the leisure to write in seclusion, unpolluted by texts, posts and status messages that the world seems intent on hurling at the writer to break her concentration. Gone too, is the empowering isolation of not knowing who one’s readers are, and of not having to be be assailed by their comments and observations – everyone’s a critic, naturally – via Twitter, Goodreads and Facebook.
In this two-way, rapidly reactive, and multidimensional environment, it’s the act of writing, and not reading, books that is threatened. Here are the five most potent threats:
Performing for an audience
Writers know too much about their readers today. The Nielsen bookscan tells them exactly how many copies of their books are sold in a given bookshop. Which means they know where their readers live, for instance. E-commerce sites provide intelligence on which time of day their books are sold the most. Readers with real names and photographs –their age, hometown, profession and favourite books all revealed in full glory – tell writers exactly what they think of their books.
The temptation to write to a known market is almost irresistible. From the time a writer could honestly claim to be writing for no specific reader – or a muse – we now live in times when such a statement is more a declaration of despair than of conviction.
Writing into a stream
Literature is increasingly being consumed within a stream of text updates, photographs, videos, and comments. The discrete, dedicated reading experience of picking up a book and looking nowhere else for amusement or information is all but dead. So, writers are being forced to adjust their output to fit into this flow rather than compelling the reader to step out of it.
But why not ignore this demand and stick to the format of the book, even if fewer and fewer people do their reading in that form anymore? The answer: the seductive power of instant recognition and the sheer width of reach. The social following that a successful writer commands ensures that posting on social media takes her poetry or prose out to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of potential readers at once. Which writer can be indifferent to this?
The need to respond at once
Writers cannot escape the real world today. Thanks to 24x7 information vigilantism on Twitter and the public obligation to rave, rant or outrage on Facebook in response to events and incidents, wardrobe malfunctions and foot-in-mouth epidemics, elections and erections, the writer is almost morally obliged to add her voice. Goodbye, thoughtful and thought-out prose, hello smart one-liner.
140 characters in search of an author
The pressure from publishers, enemies and fans to tweet is killing the writer’s ability to craft long, beautiful sentences, carrying a rich and complex thought through an aesthetically pleasing sequence of sound, rhythm and meaning. Instead, their time and effort goes on cutting words, mangling spellings, dispensing with punctuation, and even substituting "you" with "u". Great tweets, but the process rewires the brain away from writing the kind of things that make a book.
Competing with cats
This is where a writer tries to be as cute as a cat, in a million and a half different ways. After all, that’s who she’s competing with. It stokes creativity like nothing can, but it’s not the kind of purrfection you need for a book.
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