Is it too late for the Internet to melt our brains? | Salon Books

The author of a new book, A Better Pencil, says the threat of brain-melting goes farther back than Hulu, the Internet or television.

Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses culture-shifting technology in an interview with Salon Books, aptly titled Is the Internet melting our brains?

"So, what I'm trying to do is put the computer revolution into historical context to see how it fits with previous innovations in communication like pencils, like the printing press, like the clay tablet, like writing itself. A new communication technology does what old technology was able to do – sometimes better, sometimes in a little different way -- and I'm looking at how we make sense of all of this."

Salon's Vincent Rossmeier:

"Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. 'A Better Pencil' is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives."

Goodbye to some books at Bartleby.com

Alas, some old friends have disappeared from one of my favorite free online reference sites...

The "Welcome to Bartleby.com" page now carries this note:

"Due to financial and usage considerations the reference works licensed from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been removed as of June 2009."

The word "usage" is ironic: My favorite among the missing items is The Columbia Guide to Standard American English by Kenneth G. Wilson, who I knew first as a wise, frank and good-humored professor at the University of Connecticut. He was vice president when I was a reporter covering the campus, and I just noticed that his career at UConn spanned 38 years, a "school spirit" you don't see often. He passed away in 2003.

Oops, that should be "whom I knew," shouldn't it? I'm mortified.

Fortunately, Wilson's 6,500-entry book about the language is still available as a searchable electronic edition for card-holders at subscribing libraries, including our McConnell Library at Radford.

And Bartleby.com continues to publish other mostly copyright-free, but still useful, resources for students, writers and researchers... as long as they can tolerate pop-up ads (with audio) telling them they have won $1,000 giftcard from a discount retailer. (I didn't see a quick place at Bartleby to look up the Latin "caveat emptor" or Tom Waits' more contemporary line, "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.")

Included on the long list of titles are the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 vols., 1907-21) and The Oxford Shakespeare. Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford -- not bad pedigrees, if you don't mind lurking in the early twentieth century.

For American English, Bartleby still has Strunk's The Elements of Style (1918, not the later edition expanded by E.B. White) and Mencken's The American Language (1921), and for that other kind it has Fowler's The King's English, up-to-date... as of 1908.

Oh, there's also Gray's Anatomy... the book, that is... 20th ed., 1918, where you can look up pictures of body parts they don't show on the television version.

Finding time for life and "Life Inc."

Summer reading: I think it was the Frontline documentary "Merchants of Cool" that first put Douglass Rushkoff's reporting and analysis on my radar. I hope I can make time this summer for his new book, Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. The book is a call for small-scale activism, for local community, for "reconnecting with real people, places, and value."

(Will people will only see the first two words of the title and assume it's about a photo magazine, a breakfast cereal, or a board game?)

Here's a "Merchants of Cool" crossover observation from one of the Life Inc. online chapter excerpts:

"With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid's selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care."

Along with the sample chapters, this is the first book I've noticed using online video previews... (The first one starts with a 15-second burst of tuning-across-the-dial static, which almost convinced me the clip or my Web connection was faulty, but the noise goes away.)

Episodic videos on Vimeo:

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

More at http://lifeincorporated.net

A blurb from another of my favorite authors:

“Read this book if you want to understand how the current economic meltdown started 400 years ago, how so much of what you consider to be a natural evolution of daily life was carefully designed to profit a few, and how corporatism has so colonized every part of life that most of us don’t even recognize how our lives and fortunes are channeled and manipulated by it. Rushkoff is going to be attacked as a communist, but that gets his point wrong. Look at his references — he has meticulously documented his argument. I love that Rushkoff isn’t afraid to think big — very big. He took on the media more than a decade ago. Then he took on Judaism. But now he’s chosen a larger target — the corporation.” -- Howard Rheingold - author, Smart Mobs

So, is Rushkoff out to start a movement? I'd say yes, but he says no -- at least from the excerpts I've skimmed -- that the whole point is to work close to home, "reinvesting in local reality"...

"We’d each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever antimarketing media campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all... The temptation to save the whole world—and get the credit—comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place."

Happy Birthday to "the little book"

“The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White just came out in its 50th edition, so The New York Times "Room for Debate Blog" invited fans and skeptics for reactions... asking this question:

"But are its rules the be all and end all of writing? "

Happy Birthday, Strunk and White!

White's original, from before Strunk updated the book, is available for free online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/

Of course not everyone is celebrating, but even if you just want to argue about fine points of grammar, Strunk & White is a great place to start.

For more detailed questions of grammar, I point my students to Ken Wilson's Columbia Guide to Standard American English (close to 500 pages of advice) and the Guide to Grammar & Writing, a site started by Charles Darling in the early days of the Web at what was then Greater Hartford Community College.

(I knew both Ken and Charlie when they were alive, had great respect for both, and was charmed to find them both online.)

For more journalistic style and grammar issues, I suggest Gerald Grow's http://newsroom101.com

Online commerce failure: A book I'm not reading

I thought I might spend this afternoon listening to the audiobook edition of British journalist Andrew Marr's My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, but I'm not.

Roy Greenslade of The Guardian said this in his review of the book back in 2004:

It is not, thankfully, one of those hand-wringing laments for a mythical golden past. It does contain anecdotes, though they are always relevant to his wider argument. It is not a sermon, but it does raise questions about the ethical morass of modern journalism. At the same time it is often witty, consistently self-deprecating and, most importantly, makes an important contribution to the increasingly bitter debate about the nature of the British media.

Sounds like just the thing for any of my media history students who become more interested in the British side of English language journalism.

Alas, my library doesn't have it. I was pleasantly surprised when I found it at Amazon, because of a link to a downloadable audio book version. "Great," says I, "I can download it, pop it in the iPod or PalmTX (if not my Sony or Olympus MP3 recorders), and listen on the road..."

You can listen to Mr. Marr himself reading from the book in the Audible.com sample. He's charming, self-deprecating and very funny. I think journalism students would enjoy the book as text or audio. I was a bit disappointed that the audio version was abridged, but decided to create an Audible.com account and buy it.

I went through the process... filled in "shipping information" or "billing information" -- even though both the "shipping" and "billing" would be done online. When I was done with the fill-in form, Audible returned me to a screen that congratulated me on creating an account.

It didn't say anything about downloading my new book.

It didn't give me a receipt for crediting my Visa card.

I checked Audible's "library," "shopping basket" and "your account" pages, but found no record of my ordering the book.

I started worrying that I had been "phished" by some link spoofing Audible's address to steal my credit card information.

I went back to the book's page at Amazon/Audible, and noticed that I was no longer being offered the "first time customer" discount on the sales price. And when I tried to order a copy, I was sent to a new page headed "We are sorry but your geographic location prevents us from selling you this product."

I don't think that screen turned up the first time, because I was redirected to the "create a new account" pages. That would have been a nice place to tell me I was not going to be able to buy the book.

Enough with the computer. I found an 800 number and called Audible's technical support to complain that -- assuming international copyright or a publisher's restrictions are involved -- Audible should have interrupted my transaction much sooner. The customer support rep said they've tried, but couldn't figure out a way, short of putting a disclaimer on all of their pages, which would be misleading to most readers, since (he said) very few books actually have this problem. (A few readers, like me, might be interested in learning about the copyright issues or publisher's contractual obligations involved.)

I think online readers should expect more. Maybe my play-by-play account (which I emailed to Audible as well as pasting here) will inspire someone. If they get back to me about it, I'll add something here.

And maybe they'll pass the note on to the publisher, who just missed a chance to sell audiobooks to anyone reading this blog. As for me.... back to Amazon, but maybe I'm annoyed at them for linking to Audible in the first place. I wonder if its on the shelf at my local bookstore...