I promise not to spend all day writing about Twitter and the end of Western civilization, but having defended e-media of various kinds earlier this morning, now I want to plead the case for books. Here is Ezra Klein’s defense of online media:
Then there are the advantages that online media offer that books can’t match: It’s possible to follow an issue in real time. People who really wanted to understand the health-care reform conversation were better off reading Jon Cohn’s blog than any particular book or magazine. Did those people spend more time reading Jon and less time reading books?
Probably. But it was time well spent. Packer is insistent on making the point that something is lost as we move into this faster, more fractured, more condensed media environment. But so too is something gained.
Italics mine. I don’t want to disagree too much with this. Obviously online media does allow you to follow issues in real time, something that books don’t. But is it really time well spent to devote more time to reading Jon Cohn’s blog posts on healthcare and less time to reading Jon Cohn’s book about healthcare? I’m not so sure, and to this extent I think George Packer has a point when he bemoans the loss of time for reading books.
This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex issues merely by reading lots of blog posts and newspaper articles. I’m not so sure of that. There’s a big difference between a 100,000-word book on healthcare and 100,000 words of real-time commentary on healthcare. You can learn a lot from the latter, but very frequently you miss the big picture because (a) it’s not all there and (b) you have to put it together yourself over time. The result is a sort of glib and shallow understanding that can produce enjoyable polemics or good water cooler arguments, but not much more.
A few hours spent with a carefully constructed book, on the other hand, can change the way you think about something by showing you history, context, and all the non-sexy stuff — in other words, all the messy complexity — in a single package that you absorb all at once. Basically, if you read Sick, you’re getting years of Jon Cohn’s distilled knowledge of American healthcare in a few hours. To get the same from his blog posts, you’d have to spend months or years reading them, and you still wouldn’t get it all.
If you really want to understand any issue more complex than Brad and Angelina’s marital status, there’s really no substitute for a book. Not instead of blogs and newspapers and Twitter, but in addition to them. So: read more books! They’re good for you.
