More Money Than Brains (22 page)

Though they may put a partisan spin on the events of the day, cable networks and the stodgy old broadcast news organizations share one trait. They chase the latest blip, no matter how trivial or half-baked it may be. The best recent example of this happened on October 15, 2009, when the media entire went apeshit over “Balloon Boy.” The story, which was
the
story everywhere that afternoon, went like this: Six-year-old Falcon Heene of Fort Collins, Colorado, climbed into his dad’s homemade helium balloon, which somehow managed to get off the ground. The boy was trapped in the unforgiving skies, skidding through the air with helicopters, rescue services, and hordes of reporters in hot pursuit. Where and when would he land? Would he live?

I freely admit that I know very little about physics. But I, like most festivity-attending North Americans, have held a helium balloon. I have also seen balloons fly and float, and Heene’s
UFO
ish silver handiwork did not appear to be dragging ballast, or at least not kid-sized ballast. By late afternoon, when the balloon landed, boyless, the media began changing
their tack, but nobody dared insinuate it might be a hoax until the next morning, after the family’s interview with
CNN
‘s Larry King. The boy blurted the wrong thing to the World’s Oldest Interviewer, confessing that he’d hidden in a box “for the show.”

For the next couple of days, the unravelling hoax led the news. The Heenes were the number-one search topic on Google and the family appeared on
ABC
and
NBC
, where the kids were nervous to the point of puking. Reports surfaced that Heene and his wife were long-time publicity hounds and wackadoodle ones at that, who had appeared on
ABC
‘s
Wife Swap
. Heene
père
also believes in the Lizard People and chases storms. He concocted the hoax because he was mad with cockamamie dreams of his very own reality show.

The media granted Heene’s wish. Media critics saw the Balloon Boy debacle as proof that the press is more interested in being fast than in being right. Just like Web commenters who love to declare “firsties,” so too does the boob-tube brigade break stories before they have the relevant details, piling onto the new new thing, fearing that another channel might beat them to a scoop. The result? Hours of repetition, speculation, and vamping as the info trickles in. This torpor is punctuated by occasional feeding frenzies whenever a particularly meaty chunk of info bobs up among the chum. And other stories – the ones scheduled before the latest Shocking Developments! – get bumped. The economy, health care, and Afghanistan can wait until everyone’s done gawping at the drifting balloon.

Again, as in the Lauren Upton example, the Internet media were much harsher in their assessment of the story than the mainstream. Bloggers and message-board posters argued that the story was likely a hoax while the balloon was still in the air. Of course, it is easier to speculate about a child’s life from behind the Web’s veil of anonymity. At the same time, I saw a lot more balloon-related physics online than I did on
CNN
, and bloggers were quick to link to old YouTube clips of Papa Heene having conniptions on
Wife Swap
.

Once it became clear that the story was indeed a hoax, the old media lingered in Fort Collins for well over a week, providing constant updates about the likelihood of Heene’s being charged or fined for his shenanigans. Sheriff Jim Alderden told reporters, “I am confident that you folks have something better to do.”
⁸
The next day, Alderden appeared on Fox’s
O’Reilly Report
.

Like bad dinner guests,
TV
reporters show up too early and stay too late. They rush stories to air, throwing what little they know at the audience to see what sticks. If a story attracts a lot of attention, they flog it until the audience starts to turn on the tale. Then they dump it down the memory hole, never to be seen again. Internet time is different; stories appear online even more rapidly than they do on
TV
, and they linger longer too. The Internet allows people to participate in the story, to embroider it with their opinions or expertise in ways
TV
does not. Granted, sometimes this degenerates into commentary that is the digital equivalent of dirty graffiti in a bathroom stall, but there is also a lot of really great, thoughtful writing on the Web.

Some have gone so far as to claim that this is a golden age of writing. In
The Economist
‘s More Intelligent Life blog, professor Anne Trubek declared in June 2009 that “we are all writers now.”
⁹
Her students’ steady diet of Facebook status updates, texts, emails, and tweets meant they were reading and writing more than previous generations. A similar article in
Wired
two months later showcased the work of professor Andrea Lunsford, whose study of Stanford students’ writing habits found that they were doing more and more “life-writing” outside the classroom. “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she said.
¹⁰

It is indeed true that young people are typing more than their forebears. But that has not led to any marked improvements in the student essays and emails I’ve seen over the past decade. I haven’t done a formal study, but the thousands of pages I’ve corrected strongly suggest the following: Students who read books, for class and for fun, write fairly well in class and online. Students who balk at reading books send me mangled, misspelled emails and hand in essays that drain my marking pens.

This optimism about the transformative powers of the Internet becomes a problem when it starts to affect the education system. The idea that schools and universities should abandon books and follow the kids online, meeting them where their cool new literacies live, is wrong. If students are going to spend more time writing and reading, they need a rigorous education more than ever, to serve as a counterweight to the speedy, sometimes sloppy and slapdash nature of the Net.

I love the Web. However, I do not think, like some tech-noptimists, that skimming blogs or completing a Facebook quiz is equivalent to reading challenging material and learning how to make an argument about it. Rather, unprecedented access to information means it is all the more urgent that we teach students how to evaluate that information, how to judge the countless claims on sites of wildly varying quality.

Print culture and digital culture may overlap, but there are still significant differences between them. Perhaps the starkest example of the difference is the Modern Library’s list of the top one hundred English-language novels of the twentieth century. The editors posted their choices and then encouraged Web-types to vote for their favourites. The editors’ top ten selections were

  1.  
Ulysses
(James Joyce)

  2.  
The Great Gatsby
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)

  3.  
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(James Joyce)

  4.  
Lolita
(Vladimir Nabokov)

  5.  
Brave New World
(Aldous Huxley)

  6.  
The Sound and the Fury
(William Faulkner)

  7.  
Catch-22
(Joseph Heller)

  8.  
Darkness at Noon
(Arthur Koestler)

  9.  
Sons and Lovers
(D. H. Lawrence)

10.  
The Grapes of Wrath
(John Steinbeck)

I think
Lolita
is better than
Gatsby
or
Portrait
, but this is a pretty predictable canonical ranking. Hundreds of thousands of Internet voters produced the following list:

  1.  
Atlas Shrugged
(Ayn Rand)

  2.  
The Fountainhead
(Ayn Rand)

  3.  
Battlefield Earth
(L. Ron Hubbard)

  4.  
The Lord of the Rings
(J. R. R. Tolkien)

  5.  
To Kill a Mockingbird
(Harper Lee)

  6.  
1984
(George Orwell)

  7.  
Anthem
(Ayn Rand)

  8.  
We the Living
(Ayn Rand)

  9.  
Mission Earth
(L. Ron Hubbard)

10.  
Fear
(L. Ron Hubbard)

This poll ran in 1998, when publishers were just starting to dabble in digital democracy. The Modern Library launched the project to get people talking about the great books, and hundreds of thousands of people did. Lamentably, the majority flipped the bird at the great books and mass-clicked in support of agitprop for objectivism and Scientology, two of the twentieth century’s daffiest dogmas.
¹¹

I imagine this list might look slightly different now. Ayn’s turgid, rapey doorstops would still do well, but she and L. Ron might have to cede a couple of slots to recent blockbusters like the
Left Behind
books and the
Twilight
franchise. These books have some of the highest scores and the most ardent fans, so they must be the greatest. Conversely, nobody really likes – or reads – challenging shit like
Ulysses
. And any nerds who say that they do are likely indulging in old-culture snobbery, affecting cultural preferences to make other people feel dumb.

The death-of-book-reading story has been getting a fair amount of play in the press, since it goes beautifully with the
demise of journalism. For example, when a reporter from the
New York Times
asked Apple’s Steve Jobs in early 2008 about plans for an iNifty e-book reader, he dismissed the idea outright: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty per cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
¹²

The National Endowment for the Arts has tracked the number of Americans who read for pleasure since the 1980s, and their reports have consistently shown that fewer Americans, particularly young Americans, read books. But their most recent survey, released in 2008, revealed a nice little jump: a 7 per cent increase in the number of adults who read. More young people were picking up books too. The number of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who read had increased by 9 per cent.

This is happy news, but the
NEA
survey doesn’t tell us what people are reading, beyond broad categories like poetry and drama (down) or novels and short stories (up). Those increases could represent the combined effects of
Harry Potter, Twilight
, and unemployment. Reading is cheap, recession-friendly fun. And even though the number of readers is growing, the U.S. remains pretty evenly split on reading: 50.2 per cent of the respondents had read a novel in the past year; 54 per cent had read a book – any book – without their school or employer forcing them to do so.
¹³

Canadians fancy themselves more bookish than the neighbours, but this depends on whom you ask. A 2007 poll,
conducted by Ipsos-Reid for CanWest Global, found that fewer Canadians than Americans read: 31 per cent of respondents had not read a single book that year.
¹⁴
A 2007 report on the retail book trade, published by Canadian Heritage, was much more positive, asserting that the number of Canucks who read for pleasure stayed consistent throughout the 1990s and 2000s. However, based on StatsCan numbers from 2005, they also claim that nine out of ten Canadians read for pleasure, which frankly seems way too good to be true.
¹⁵

Again, like the
NEA
surveys, this doesn’t tell us much about what people are reading. A cursory scan of the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists on either side of the border reveals that most North Americans like the same things: vampires, magic, spirituality, conspiracies, celebrities, weight loss, getting rich quick, and triumphing over adversity.

One of the biggest bestsellers on both sides of the border lo these past few years is Randy Pausch’s
The Last Lecture
. Like many publishing sensations, it started as something else, achieving success in another cultural medium before it became a book. Pausch delivered the lecture in 2007 at his home campus, Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught computer programming. He had recently learned that he had pancreatic cancer, and he used the speech to deliver life lessons to his very young children. The speech became a hit on YouTube, Pausch appeared on Oprah, and the lecture appeared in book form in the spring of 2008.

Pausch’s book enjoyed a seventy-nine-week ride on the
New York Times
advice list, and it was on the
Globe and Mail
‘s non-fiction bestseller list for more than a year. This is the
kind of book that people buy in triplicate, quadruplicate, to give to their friends and relatives. It was a smash, but it did not manage to best Mitch Albom’s 205-week streak of
NYT
bestsellerdom for
Tuesdays with Morrie
, another sentimental swan song from a wise prof. Pausch, to be fair, joked about the success of both books. “I didn’t know there was a dying professor section at the bookstore,” he said.
¹⁶

If there were a dying professor section, it would do much brisker trade than one dedicated to the work of vigorous nerds. Suffering the inevitable, suffering cheerfully and gratefully, is a far more impressive credential than any degree. Even people who gave Pausch’s book a one-star rating on Amazon prefaced their reviews by saying they were sorry he was dying, they hated to pick on a guy with cancer, but he really shoulda saved this pile of platitudes for his family.

A video of
The Last Lecture
has also aired repeatedly on
PBS
, where a pledge-week host enthused, “Did you notice that Randy uses the word
dream
more than the words
teach
or
learn?
“ I did – it’s hard not to – but I was considerably less tickled by that than the talking head was. Pausch offers a very contemporary cocktail of techno-rationalism and sentiment. His title for the lecture was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and he talks about how he did precisely that, by never giving up, by greeting every brick wall as a new opportunity. Pausch is also part of Camp Quit Bitching. One of his chapter titles is “Don’t Complain, Just Work Harder,” the kind of jocular, boss-friendly advice that is common in positive thinking.