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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Writers, more than anybody else, seem to worry about the challenges posed by revolutions in communications technology. A PEN conference I once attended in London, back in the 1950s, saw writers from all over the world discussing the impact of television on books and, naturally, their authors. Some were vehemently opposed to this new invention, calling for its boycott. Others, like J B Priestly, warned writers that they would be ignoring television at their own risk. A few years later, in 1978, PEN held an international seminar in Barcelona under the auspices of UNESCO, to discuss the survival -- or demise -- of literature. From the very first sentence, the published proceedings reflected worries that bordered on paranoia: "Recent enormous increases in new ways of communication have greedily gobbled up many of the hours that used to be spent on reading."
It is the computer, however, that now poses the greatest threat to reading. Yet here lies the paradox, for everyday computers generate millions of words which seem to disappear almost as soon as they appear. The Barcelona seminar sounded a pessimistic note which, in retrospect, seems to have been a false alarm: "Literature is diminishing at such a frightening rate that no longer can anybody automatically assume that an educated man or woman is also a well-read one. Reading reviews replaces reading books and soon it will be as rare to meet someone who has actually read his own culture's classics as it is to meet someone who reads Latin or Greek today." This statement can be questioned in the light of the sale of books in both England and America since 1978.
People have been crying wolf, of course, but the threat now comes from different quarters. Concerns about the demise of literature and reading seem to have been hibernating for a long time. Suddenly, these days, they have started to surface again, but this time the enfant terrible is the internet. The sounding note, however, is not a pessimistic one. Research indicates that books have been standing up to the challenge.
Recently in The Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard raised these questions with reference to many writers. Appleyard claims that he has routinely seen "Shakespeare, heavy-weight philosophy, poetry and all manner of black-backed Penguin Classics being consumed on public transport." For the British, it seems, books have remained a primary agent of absorption; they only need to be absorbed in a book to feel contented. According to statistics, the British book market currently looks more solid than the American.
Appleyard then comes to the crucial point about the claim that computers will be putting books out of business, a heresy propagated by the current British mania for computers in schools. It is as if school children need them, from their earliest years, much like they need vaccinations. The real problem with the entire hi-tech culture is the destructive neutrality stemming from the idea of information. Information is conceived of as a bottomless well into which we dip our little buckets. Isn't it possible that the internet will lead to an autistic world? Appleyard's conclusion is worth quoting in full: "The book is not just another information storage medium... It is not just something we use. It is something that lifts us like a glove, it is almost impossible to imagine how it could be improved."
