ANALYTICAL writing often involves searching for a common thread, a common theme that ties works or ideas together. If there is one thread that runs through each of us and through our peers in other places and other times, it's reading.
Across time and geographical space, civilizations have been marked and defined by their use of the written word. In our lifetimes, that's threatening to change. We can't let it.
The Internet, scanners and digital file formats have largely obliterated the need for printed magazines and journals. Articles are available faster, more conveniently and cheaper in electronic form.
E-mail rapidly has entrenched itself as the primary means of communication for many and at least an important form for most. Handwritten letters are virtually obsolete. Other than the occasional birthday card or thank-you note - and even these have migrated to the digital realm - no one really writes letters anymore.
Newspapers, too, have moved to the electronic realm. Online editions now rival print versions for readership at many newspapers, including this one.
Even books threaten to be replaced by their electronic cousins. Both CD-ROMs and fairly new handheld machines that look like oversized Palm Pilots provide full-text books on electronic displays.
Technological changes to all aspects of communication threaten the written word. The digital revolution is a powerful one, and much more difficult to resist than a revolution of military or economic struggle. But it's a juggernaut we must resist.
There is evidence that electronic substitutes for printed material are inferior in communicating their information. Research presented last month by Ohio State University psychologists to the American Psychological Association suggests that students who read text in electronic form find it harder to understand, less interesting and less persuasive than those who read the same information in print.
But concerns about the effectiveness of digital substitutes for print are only the beginning. Even if digital formats communicate information as well as or better than print media, we should still cling to books and the written word.
Paper media, particularly books, are important in ways that can't be measured by psychological testing. They're crucial in an intangible, unquantifiable way by virtue of our physical connection to them.
Books play a physical role in our sense of identity - they help determine who we are. University English Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove puts it beautifully in the introduction to her Selected Poems: "First and foremost, now, then, and always, I have been passionate about books. From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy."
Of course, not every person feels this passion for books. But some do. At the least, we can recognize books' capacity to produce that passion. It's hard to imagine someone having those same feelings for text on a computer screen.
And even though most wouldn't say that books send them "into ecstasy," on some level, everyone can and should appreciate the value of books as physical, tangible objects.
Books ground us. They are substantial; they have weight. They reflect us in a very physical sense - marking our lives and our passage through the world. They become unique along with us, acquiring tears, stains, folds and wrinkles as we do. They stand on bookshelves as monuments to who we were and are, to where we've been and what we've been like on the way. Above all, books aren't sterile.
Digitizing everything in our lives threatens to make our culture, identity and memory transient and fragile. It produces, to borrow novelist Milan Kundera's term, an "unbearable lightness of being." As our existence becomes electronic, only meaningful in terms of computers and machines, it loses its substance. In a sea of anonymous binary code, everything becomes weightless. Nothing is tangible, so nothing seems real.
Using technology to improve our lives is one thing. But we're on the track to go much further than a few alterations or improvements. We're heading for changes that will render obsolete the books and physical connections that give our existence meaning and form.
If we continue, we're in danger of floating away into the ether. That's just something to keep in mind next time you log on to the Web to read instead of walking to the library or bookstore for the book.
(Bryan Maxwell is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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