My recent trip to the US was a pleasure, except for one shock: I went to the nearest Borders bookstore, and discovered the bookseller chain had closed forever the preceding week.
I do favor small independent bookstores, and have been worried about their tendency to disappear under pressure of the larger chains; still, I had to admit that Borders had a pleasant aspect that provided a bookworm with a delightful experience. Seeing it go under – one can surmise, due to the pressure of Internet-based alternatives and other shifts in information consumption habits of the 21st century – was profoundly saddening to me.
So, to pay my respects to this venerable bookseller, I dug up an old bookmark I have (I collect bookmarks of stores I like) from their Ann Arbor location – the town where Borders originated 40 years ago – and here it is. Somehow the serene reading lady in this vignette represents the pleasure that Borders had given us all.
It will be remembered fondly.
The IORG “Literary Salon” online event last week was very interesting, with five authors of books about Information Overload comign together to discuss their books.
A recording of the entire event is available for your enjoyment here. A summary by one of the attendees is available here.
Enjoy!
Novelist Alan Bissett wrote a fascinating post in The Guardian’s books blog, titled Who stole our reading time?
It points out explicitly what we all experience: we read less today than ever before. And I’m not complaining about the young generation; I’m comparing now and then within the same generation, whether mine or Bissett’s (who is about a generation younger than me). The basic observation is that nobody has the time, or the will, or the ability, to finish books the size of War and Peace anymore; or to read the voluminous classics of centuries past at all. Bissett links this to the flood of entertainment options, whether TV, gaming, or the Internet; as he says, “A leisure time that was already precious has been chewed into by text-messaging, Facebook and emails. Almost everyone I speak to claims that they “love books but just can’t find the time to read”. Well, they probably could – they’re just choosing to spend it differently.”
The problem, Bissett opines, is that this has dire consequences for our collective intellect, because it steers our mental development in a limited direction: “Sustained concentration on the printed word, whether in-depth argument or fictional narrative, creates a particular cerebral event which visual-dependent media cannot.”
Read the post to form your own opinion. For my own part, I still consider myself an avid bookworm, but this definition is beginning to lose plausibility – I read so much less than I voraciously used to before. It may or may not have dire consequences, but it is a sad change for me personally. Yet another impact of the new century’s rampant Information Overload.
Email Overload is one affliction that people accept more or less willingly. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head, after all. So why are knowledge workers doing this to themselves?
We’ll be discussing many causes in this blog, but today I want to probe a remark made by a friend: he observes many knowledge workers who feel that getting lots of email enhances their status. Basically they’re saying “Watch me – I’m important, I get lots of mail and I’m busy handling all of it!”
This absurd position reminds me of a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s immortal “The Little Prince”. It describes the planetoid of the businessman; the one who sits day and night at his desk, adding up numbers of stars he claims to own. Obviously he gains nothing, but he is so full of himself because he’s busy, as behooves a serious businessman; he takes pride in not having a free moment: “can’t stop… I have so much to do! I am concerned with matters of consequence!” The prince, who is so attuned to the really important things in life, would never understand this viewpoint; one suspects he’d never own a blackberry either (but he did have a rose, and a sheep in a box, remember).
The notion that people would prefer to appear busy doing something that clobbers their ability to create real value is sad; but then, humans do many sad things, some of them more harmful than this one. In any event, I’d like to know: do you see this phenomenon around you? Or – be honest – do you see it in the mirror perhaps? Do tell!
