This is a follow-up from my previous post “We are Entertaining Ourselves to Death”
If immersion in a media-saturated world fosters numbness and detachment, what would it look like to re-engage the literary world? David Brooks offers some insight comments. He notes that the hierarchy of literature (beach books at bottom and classics at the top) creates a scale for personal growth in wisdom and learning.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
The internet, on the other hand, is radically egalitarian. There is no hierarchy.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference…Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.