Must It Be "Books v. The Internet"?

I forgot.  I actually completed another book this month, before I completed "The Journal Keeper". And it was a goodie, too, except where the author, Gaty Ulin, an LA Times columnist, felt the need to make some right versus left commentary in his discussion of politically manipulative narrative. Naturally, it is the right leaning that is empty and callow in that regard. I just never understand why EVERYTHING has to have such interjection, like at rock concerts. Be that as it may, I otherwise loved this book, which points out the dangers of a connected, yet disengaged world of technology and invites us (in my view) not to let go of the tactile (emotionally as well as physically) world of books.

It is not, however, an attempt to say that technology is bad; perhaps it is only to suggest that the difference between reading and immersing oneself in books is such that we do not necessarily want to jettison books because technology allows us to read on a screen. Perhaps, and I am not sure he said this, he might have, though, entirely different parts of the brain are at work when one is reading a paper book, than when reading on the various sizes of screens now available to us. He does ask the question of whether what we do on a screen really is reading at all, at least in the traditional sense.

In the fictional 23rd century of Star Trek, you may or may not recall, which was really a prescient 1960's group of television writers under the aegis of producer and writer Gene Roddenberry, there was a lawyer played by Elisha Cook, Jr. who refused to rely on technology in his defense of Captain Kirk from a crime he did not commit. Even before we ever thought of Kindles, or Nooks, or cell phones for that matter (our 20th and 21st version of the "communicator"), somebody out there was already aware that technology was a double edged sword. I always loved that episode of TOS ("the Original Series") because I could never imagine that books, the printed on paper ones, would be properly allowed to become extinct. I was committed, even at age 11 or 12, that I would always have books around me, as I had growing up, shelves and shelves of them. There is something distinctly less satisfying, even as much as I love the computer, and the amazing surfeit of material it contains, going to the screen rather than into my makeshift physical library (really a converted closet) and searching through my books, scanning not only the title but the book itself, for something that I have suddenly gotten the desire to read again.
Somehow it is harder to get into a screen than it is to get into a book. You touch past, present, future, your own life and the life, fictional or otherwise, of the hero or heroine of the book.  Here is just one paragraph from Mr. Ulin in speaking about a Signet paperback "Three by Flannery O'Connor" he first read when he was 19:  Why does (it) continue to resonate even after Wise Blood emptied out for me? Because of how the book, the object, recalls my experience of reading it, nineteen years old, as lonely and alienated as Hazel Motes, waiting in a Flagstaff, Arizona hotel for daybreak, when I would board an Amtrak train bound for Chicago and then Massachusetts, to see my family for the first time in nearly a year."  A book he posits represents not only where we have been but where we wish to go. A library represents our imagination, in three dimensions, he says, which a screen, I have decided, can never do, no matter how much information is crammed within it.

Still, I don't think it is a competition between book and internet, if we really work at it--it can be a partnership. I do not intend to give up one in favor of the others; surely our pluralistic America can accommodate both. Both can integrate into our essences, without sacrifice of any. For my money, reading will never be a lost art.