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From n+1 magazine…

In response or in addition to the two essays on the future of reading and writing, we’ve asked the authors, as well as editor Mark Greif, to answer us two questions.

1. Along with everyone else, n+1 seems to have grown increasingly gloomy about the “future of the book.” How is the current bout of gloom similar to past worries about the destruction of mind by technology and other entertainments (the railroads, TV)?

2. How is it different?

Answers below.

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Benjamin Kunkel:

I think probably people’s fears about the intellectual effects of TV and even the railroads were justified enough: TV would cause you to zone out and the railroad journey would mean you didn’t notice the same things about the countryside that Goethe did when he traveled to Italy by carriage. For that matter I think cheap printing was in its way a destructive technology, in that people presumably read less epic and lyric poetry and more novels, mostly bad ones, and certainly a lot more newspapers. They’d already entered the shallows. More…