In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading:

[David Shields’s] Reality Hunger and [Masha Tupitsyn’s] Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.

Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it portends, in two nicely circuitous longforms: Longform #1 and Longform #2.

Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms of intellectual property. The activists were joined in the cause by many large internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The motivations of the corporations and the activists overlapped to some degree, but there were also important differences. The activists were fighting for the cause of freedom; they worried that the bill would impede the flow of information online, to the detriment of people using the net. The corporations had business interests to protect. They feared a wave of litigation and other operational and legal headaches, as well as the possible rise of obstacles to the development of new products and services.

It will be interesting to watch how internet activists will deploy their considerable power in the future, and it will be particularly interesting to watch how much muscle they’ll flex when their opponents on an issue are the same corporations that joined them in the fight against SOPA. We may actually get a good idea of how the “internet spring” will progress very soon – tomorrow, in fact. That’s when, according to reports, the European Commission will unveil a sweeping proposal to defend people’s right and ability to control the personal information that’s collected about them online by internet businesses, advertising syndicates, and media companies. The proposed law, which if approved would take the place of the current hodgepodge of national privacy regulations throughout the EU, would, according to the BBC, require that companies obtain people’s consent before collecting information about them, notify people when they collect data on them and explain how the data will be used and stored, allow people to easily review the data held about them, and allow people to transfer personal data from one company to another. The law also includes what’s being called a “right to be forgotten,” which means that companies would have to delete personal information they store when people request it. Companies would also have to divulge any breaches or losses of personal data within 24 hours.

Data-hungry companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have yet to weigh in on the proposal, but if history is a guide they are likely to oppose it. Their opposition will be motivated by some of the same business concerns they had about SOPA: the threat of litigation and operational headaches, and the restriction of some types of innovation, in this case ones that require the unfettered use and exchange of personal data for commercial gain. No doubt, they’ll also whine about how difficult it will be, technically, to obey the law. These are companies that can build a car that can drive itself, but making data collection transparent and giving people tools to control it – well, gee, that’s really hard.

Internet executives like Mark Zuckerberg like to argue that “privacy” is an outdated concern. But when people talk about privacy, what they’re really talking about is freedom: the freedom to be in charge of their own information. Guaranteeing the freedom of information online entails not only questions of flow but also questions of control. Frankly, it sometimes seems like Silicon Valley is more interested in the freedom of data than in the freedom of people.

So will internet activists rise up again, this time to protect people’s freedom to control their information online? If Facebook and Twitter don’t get behind individual rights in this case, will activists organize boycotts of their services as they boycotted those of companies that supported SOPA? Will the Google employees who spoke out eloquently against SOPA on their personal blogs and through social network accounts speak out with equal eloquence in support of the protection of personal privacy? Will Wikipedia go dark for another day? When it comes to shaping the future of the Net, fights about privacy are at least as important as fights about piracy.

“Before the printing press,” writes Lawrence Summers in the Times’s Education Life section today, “scholars had to memorize ‘The Canterbury Tales’ to have continuing access to them.” That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came along, and people were writing stuff down – on scrolls, tablets, blocks of wood – long before the book was created. In the 100 or so years between the writing of Chaucer’s masterpiece and the establishment of a printing trade in England, handwritten copies of “The Canterbury Tales” were fairly abundant, particularly for those who would qualify as scholars. It was one of the most popular books of the time. If you wanted “access” to the work, you didn’t have to pull Chaucer’s lines from your memory; you could read them from pages that looked like this:

Maybe Summers was confusing Chaucer with Homer, and the printing press with the alphabet.

Anyway, Summers’ historical howler comes, amusingly, in the service of an argument that students don’t need to learn stuff anymore: “in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.” I’ll leave aside the question of why Summers didn’t whip out his iPhone and google “Canterbury Tales” or “printing press” or “codex” while writing his article. But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts – that we can know without knowing – really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It’s wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn’t mean that the contents of our memory doesn’t matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we’re lucky, wisdom.

To mark its 21st birthday, Vintage Books has released a collection of essays on reading called Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! Contributors include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. I also have a piece in the book, “The Dreams of Readers,” in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars like Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, that’s being done on the psychology of literary reading. Here’s a short excerpt from my essay:

When we open a book, it seems that we really do enter, as far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its rich emotional force. Psychologists draw a distinction between two kinds of emotions that can be inspired by a work of art. There are the “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator: a sense of beauty or of wonder, for instance, or a feeling of awe at the artist’s craft or the work’s unity. These are the emotions that Montaigne likely had in mind when he spoke of the languid pleasure of reading. And then there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates. These are the emotions Emerson may have had in mind when he described the spermatic, life-giving force of a “true book.” …

A recent experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities. The researchers recruited 166 university students and gave them a standard personality test that measures such traits as extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. One group of the participants read the Chekhov short story “The Lady with the Toy Dog,” while a control group read a synopsis of the story’s events, stripped of its literary qualities. Both groups then took the personality test again. The results revealed that the people “who read the short story experienced significantly greater change in personality than the control group,” and the effect appeared to be tied to the strong emotional response that the story provoked. What was particularly interesting, Oatley says, is that the readers “all changed in somewhat different ways.” A book is rewritten in the mind of every reader, and the book rewrites each reader’s mind in a unique way, too.

What is it about literary reading that gives it such sway over how we think and feel and perhaps even who we are? Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question. Although our emotional and intellectual responses to events in literature mirror, at a neuronal level, the responses that we would feel if we actually experienced those events, the mind we read with, argues Holland in his book Literature and the Brain, is a very different mind from the one we use to navigate the real world. In our day-to-day lives, we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or clicking on a link at a website. But when we open a book, our expectations and our attitudes change drastically. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence are able to “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.” That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work. We read the author’s words with “poetic faith,” to borrow a phrase that the psychologically astute Coleridge used two centuries ago.

“We gain a special trance-like state of mind in which we become unaware of our bodies and our environment,” explains Holland. “We are ‘transported.’” It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s transformative emotional power. That doesn’t mean that reading is anti-social. The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations. Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us more empathetic, more alert to the inner lives of others. The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! is available as a paperback in the UK and as an e-book in the US.

It dawns on me that there may be a correspondence between Steven Johnson’s vision of serendipity as the output of a properly manipulated digital mechanism and Nick Bilton’s belief in the scheduling of units of daydreaming as a means for the optimization of problem-solving. The Like button seems to be part of the same trend. Let’s call it the Industrialization of the Ineffable.

The future, it seems, is too much for Nick Bilton. The New York Times’s in-house webstud, and author of the book I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works, had something of a Joycean epiphany last week. Perched atop a rocky cliff, watching the sun dissolve majestically into the Pacific, he immediately did, he writes, “what any normal person would do in 2011”: he whipped out his iPhone and started farting around with it, eager to come up with something “to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.”

But then a wave of self-doubt broke upon his consciousness:

Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.” [the guy even talks to himself in stilted prose! -snarky blogger]

That gave him pause. It was like one of those moments when Pandora stops the music stream and asks you if you’re still listening. And so, “after talking to people who do research on subjects like this,” Bilton made a resolution for 2012: he will, he says, “spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone.” He is nothing if not ambitious.

Now, followers of Bilton may at this point be feeling a little shiver of deja vu running up their spines. It was just a year ago, after all, when he announced his resolution for 2011, which was – you guessed it – to spend a small amount of time offline every day. He would, he wrote back then, be “retreating just a little bit from the digital paraphernalia.”

I will leave it to the addiction experts to interpret Bilton’s behavior. What interests me is what he plans to do with his half hour of daily disconnectedness this coming year. He’s going to devote the time, he says, to daydreaming. “Daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems,” he explains.

I used to think that daydreams just sort of happened, that they weren’t really something you could plan ahead for, like a dentist appointment. But, I have to say, Bilton’s plan sounds appealing. You schedule a 30-minute daily daydreaming slot onto your Google Calendar, and when the moment arrives you switch off the iPhone, iPad, etc., and immediately enter a fugue state in which your subsconscious is allowed to work its magic. You emerge, a half hour later, refreshed, bursting with creativity, and ready for some high-octane problem-solving.

In fact, now that I think about it, maybe this isn’t a case of Bilton retreating, tail between legs, from the future. Maybe, even in taking his daily 30-minute daydream break, he will actually still be dwelling in the future. I bet when the Google Brain Plug-in finally ships, it will come with a Daydream App. For a half hour every day, your brain will automatically be switched into blue-screen mode. Disconnected from the data flow, you will be plunged into a regenerative state of unconsciousness, broken only by the occasional subliminal advertisement.