The New York Times has published a debate on the question “Do school libraries need books?” I am one of the contributors, along with Cushing Academy’s James Tracy.

Some followup on my earlier post:

In today’s New York Times, Jenna Wortham reports:

It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline. And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes:

Even if we feel like we’re consuming the New York Times and Taylor Swift’s new album for free over the Internet, we’re paying thousands of dollars a year to access all that “free” content … We tell ourselves that we’re paying for connectivity, but obviously we’re paying to be connected to information. So how are media publishers failing if we’re paying more than ever for our media? The key seems to be that consumers have learned to put a price on access, but not on individual content … Today’s media mindset is “A thousand dollars for access, and not one cent for content.”

As an example of the prevailing trend, the US Department of Labor reports that over the past decade (through 2008) the amount an average American spends annually on newspapers and magazines has dropped by about 40%, from $97 to $61, but the amount spent for Internet access has more than quadrupled, from $49 to $222:

The average American’s annual telephone bill, including both landline and cellular, rose from $914 in 2001 to $1,127 in 2008, an increase of nearly 25%, according to the Labor Dept.

As for spending on cable television, the Census Bureau reports that the average American’s annual bill has gone from $256 in 2004 to a projected $401 this year, a jump of 57%.

How about radio, the original free broadcast medium? The Census Bureau reports that per capita expenditures on radio programming have increased about tenfold from $1.19 in 2004 to an estimated $12.25 this year.

I’m telling you, that free information really adds up.

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.

Here’s how Pew puts the bad news:

While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.

They even have a chart, just to rub salt in the wound:

When I blog these days, I feel like I should be sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a highly absorptive undergarment, and writing posts debunking some overhyped new bunion treatment (iPads?).

Yesterday I was out taking a walk and I happened to pass a group of tweens congregating on a street corner. I heard one of them say, “Hey, that guy’s a blogger,” and then they all started throwing their empty energy-drink cans at me. I had to take refuge in a Starbucks. I spent a half hour crying into my double-tall.

I hear that in middle schools “blogger” has become the most common term of abuse, playing roughly the same role that “wuss” used to play:

“You’re such a blogger, Derek.”

“You’re the blogger, Sean.”

“Am not.”

“Are too!”

Blogger jokes are turning into the new big thing on college campuses:

Q: How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Who cares?

Very funny.

I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I’ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net’s effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday:

July 30, 2008: “I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ I mean, we’ve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author … points out that deep reading is equal to deep thinking, and since we’re not reading deep anymore, we’re obviously not deep thinking. And what I was realizing in reading this – and I encourage you all to read it – is that this is exactly what people said when color television arrived in my home in Virginia 40 years ago. This is also what people said 25 years ago when the MTV phenomenon occurred, about short attention spans and so forth. And I observe that we’re smarter than ever. So the important point here is that [despite] all of these sort of histrionics about the role of information and other changes, society is enormously powerful, enormously capable of adapting to the threats.”

March 6, 2009: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.”

January 29, 2010: “The one thing that I do worry about is the question of ‘deep reading.’ As the world looks to these instantaneous devices … you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading.”

I’m glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly.

How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it?

transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: “the making a fact the subject of thought raises it” http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)<----interesting!

I just heard the sad news that J. D. Salinger has died. He was 91.

I went to school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is just a few miles north of Cornish, New Hampshire, where Salinger lived. During the summer between my junior and senior year, I had a job at the circulation desk at the Dartmouth library. I was working one morning when my boss tapped me on the shoulder and motioned with his head over to the side of the desk. I just caught a glimpse of a tall, slender, slightly stooped man going through the doorway into the stacks. “That’s J. D. Salinger,” my boss whispered.

Holy crap, I thought. I just saw J. D. Salinger.

About ten minutes later Salinger suddenly reappeared at the desk, holding a dollar bill. I went over to him, and he said he needed change for the Xerox machine. I took his dollar and gave him four quarters.

That’s my claim to fame: I gave J. D. Salinger change for a buck.

The Britannica Blog is running, in conjunction with The Futurist magazine, a forum on Learning & Literacy in the Digital Age, which includes a piece by me on the resilience of the written word. (The brief piece actually originally appeared in a recent issue of The Futurist).

First paragraph:

The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the neck, give it a shake, and say, Get off the stage, dammit. Your time is up.

Read the rest of it.