We’re reading an equivalent amount of stuff on the Internet, though, aren’t we? Yes, but it’s a different kind of reading. This case was made five years ago by Nicholas Carr in an Atlantic article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr thinks it is. I’m reading something (he says) when an IM or email comes in and diverts me; or I encounter a hyperlink, follow the hyperlink, and now I’m reading something else. (No, this is not just like a footnote, for reasons Carr explains: “Hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.”) Or even without the hyperlink, something occurs to me and I go look it up. (No, this is not like getting out of my chair to check a different book on my shelves. I don’t have to get up.) Carr: “The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

All right, you may say, but the way we take in knowledge and entertainment changes with technology and always has. Spoken transmission of ideas and stories gave way to writing; stage plays gave way to movies, radio, and TV. Plato thought the invention of writing meant we “would cease to exercise memory.” He was probably right, but writing gave words a permanence they had not had before, a positive that surely outweighed the negative.

Well, yes, but I’m just not seeing anything positive in the death of books. A few months ago I unmasked myself on Taki’s Magazine as a beginner-level Civil War buff. At that point my main source of instruction was audio: Prof. Gallagher’s very excellent series from the Great Courses company. A friend then lent me the Ken Burns video documentary, which I watched with interest. Historian Shelby Foote makes several appearances there, and I rather liked the cut of his jib, so my next port of call was Foote’s humongous three-volume narrative of the war.

(Concerning which, a brief bleg, if I may. A local independent bookstore gave me a deal on the three-volume set, secondhand and a bit battered but perfectly readable. Volume Two, however, has no dust jacket. If anyone has a spare of that dust jacket, please let me know.)

So I have “done” the Civil War in video, audio, and book form. I’d rate the information content per hour spent as roughly doubling from medium to medium: audio twice as informative as video, print twice as informative as audio. Books rule.

But I’m pissing into the wind, I know. The intelligence of our species is declining; that’s obvious. On top of that general trend, the USA’s overall bookishness is being dragged down by our huge new population of Mexicans, a people of zero civilizational attainment who do not read books.

Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, had the agents of an authoritarian state hunting down books and burning them. The actual future, almost upon us now, will be less dramatic, though just as enstupidating. We won’t burn books; we’ll just forget about them.

Image of books courtesy of Shutterstock