The Book and the Article
Reading can be considered the essential art — along with writing, speech and oral tradition which together comprise the essential parts of wisdom. It is a widely held belief that the more you read, the more “well-read” you are, and the more educated you are.
However, the manner and medium in which you receive information has a huge effect on how you listen, learn, and retain it. I am much more likely to comprehend the nuances of Plato’s Republic in a classroom or on my favorite sofa than in a loud pub or during a senior staff meeting.
How we receive information matters.
If technology has had an effect on anything, it has likely been on the written word. The relationship between a reader and a book is thousands of years old and requires no real explanation. But the excessive influx of concise, visual media: tweets, blog posts, videos, audio books, memes; they all point to a transformation of the written word. Some call it a truncation or an over-simplification of normal substance. Others call it noise. Many optimistically call it “a new way of communicating.”
Regardless of your emotion toward the rapid, vapid growth of instantaneous media, the fact remains that each newly introduced medium modifies the relationship between the individual and the information in some way. Reading is no longer picking up an interesting book or required reading but receiving an email, having an interesting photo catch your eye, or skimming article headlines.
Add in a complex layer of marketing professionals, big data gurus and ad managers who will tweak or leverage that relationship in order to make money and you have a real clog of incentives.
Reading is no longer that simple.
The Relationship
The relationship is of key importance. On their face, the book and the article appear identical. The only discernable difference is the physical nature of the book versus the screen on which we read the article. However, I will argue that the relationships we have with each medium are dramatically different and our failure to recognize those differences is a huge threat to knowledge.
The Book
The physical book has humble beginnings, really. Long before we were expressing insights or opining philosophy in them, the written word was reserved for record-keeping. The relationship between the book and individual, thousands of years before Christ, was pretty simple:
X is important. We wrote X down so that if you need to reference X, it is easily attainable. You do not have to ask N people for X.
The book’s first purpose was to exist as a source of knowledge, a lexicon. Like coin to make bartering more fluid and transactional, the book was used to record and keep knowledge in one place so that others may more easily attain it. This could include historical, philosophical, mathematical or even literary narratives.
For just one book, dozens of men would comb over every letter, every detail and tirelessly replicate the same information and illustrations by hand thousands of times. The book was not only a metaphorical symbol of knowledge but a physical manifestation of it; knowledge with mass. It was due great honor for the intensive labor put into it — even before its contents.
The point here is that the relationship between the reader and the book originated as a reservoir for only the most crucial information or stories, information set in stone and often incredibly difficult to someone untrained in the particular study. These studies would provide an intellectual or moral grounding for anyone reading.
The book does not pander to its reader. It is a record of knowledge. It is a challenge.
There are thousands, maybe millions of books on Amazon now that do exactly that (pander) but I would like to discard them from this discussion as they are part of the greater problem described earlier. Let us pretend we live in a world where the original reason for keeping books is honored and bad books are always rejected publishing.
With this definition, we can understand the concrete importance of the book and our relationship to it. The book is without want or desire. We ascend to the book. We admire it. We seek to learn from the book and achieve the intellectual rewards it supplies. The book does not seek us out in any way.
It is only in the deconstruction of the book do we begin to see a wanting of equality with the book. Every author who ever began writing started with a pure motivation to have his novels among Chesterton and Hemingway.
The Article
The article stems of lesser estate, the origins of which can be found in the telegraph, early newspapers, and propaganda. The article has its roots in information dissemination as well as persuasion.
We can see that the relationship between the reader and the article is immediately different than the book. The idea of the article is to persuade and inform of events and facts, whereas the book is to retain ideas and educate. The ephemeral nature of the article makes it impossible to keep other than for reason of nostalgia. You would have to be crazy to collect newspapers and study them hoping to learn something.
It can be argued that the article can teach. And I would say that every piece of writing begins at its purest form and degrades in exchange for other traits, be it messaging, brevity, reading level or funding. Every good article starts as a book and ends as a contrived product of many.
Much like the book, the article moves through just as many men and in similar ways. But the focus is subjective and constantly changing. Where monks could suffer long hours to maintain the intricate details of an objective duplication, journalists spend the same time manufacturing a story in the first place.
The book is merely a place to store understood knowledge, but articles seek to create knowledge from people and events, a glorified non-fiction short story. However, unlike a good short story, the article is written by many authors for many reasons, the least of which is understood by the original writer.
The article is also always subject to change. If something unforeseen occurs or a writer is grossly incompetent, words are fluid. Online, corrections can be made without anyone realizing. Links can be changed, photos can be swapped and information can be doctored. The living organism of the modern article opens itself to many weaknesses.
But the largest weakness of all is the relationship between the reader and the article. The article seeks out its reader and is ultimately aimed at pleasing someone. Even the most substance-filled long-reads find themselves echoing a derivative of the book.
The Information Threshold
The internet offers us an infinite sea of information. I know colleagues who feel that unless they are constantly absorbing some of that seawater they are missing out or uninformed. But sea-sickness is deceitful.
Each moment we spend exercising our mind has a cost of time and energy, and unfortunately we do not retain everything. In fact, science shows us that unless we have 1) a desire to learn, 2) a practical application for the knowledge and 3) some great eureka moment of self-discovery, the information we grasp for quickly slips through our fingers.
Try not to take this the wrong way, but before you fill your day with articles that largely promulgate your ego, try picking up a difficult book instead.
You might just learn something.
If you enjoyed what you read, please click the heart ❤ and give that big red button above a click to get my weekly newsletter! — Michael
