Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight.
Most of you dudes know I split my time these days between school in Ann Arbor and home in Chicago. The best way to get back and forth is Megabus, which I took yet again today.
(For anyone interested, here’s a quick cost-benefit analysis of the transportation links between Ann Arbor and Chicago:
- Megabus – Cost averages $25, mostly comfortable, takes 4.5 hours including stop for food — though sadly, only at Hardee’s. Nasty.
- Amtrak – Cost is $29 on weekdays but $75 on weekends. Most comfortable option, but delayed so often that it averages six hours per trip.
- Driving – Cost depends on MPG (about 3/4 tank when I take the VW) but you can’t really do any work. Takes about four hours, and you then have to find parking.
- Greyhound – Hellz no.)
To finally get to the point of my post, today we hit the food break at the Love’s truck stop — the one with the Hardee’s — at mile marker 110, which not only has just one fast-food option but also plays Fox News in the dining area. (Megabus used to stop at the truck stop in Sawyer, Mich., which has a Popeye’s, BK, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Express. Now that is a quality junk-food spread. I think Love’s must have started paying them to subject us to Hardee’s.) I ate a Thickburger anyway and we left 30 minutes later.
Next up was the exercise in group morality: The driver came on the intercom about 20 miles past Love’s and announced that a passenger was left behind at the truck stop. Whoops. The driver had made several announcements when we stopped that everyone had to be back on by 3 p.m. EST, but whoever this person was somehow failed to note the time. The driver initially said he was going to turn around despite his anger and pick up the person, which would have resulted in us being about 40-50 minutes late in arriving. A bunch of passengers told the driver to keep going anyway — because hey, screw that anonymous guy — so he then announced he was not turning around.
I and the passengers around me found this a bit heartless — anybody who plans an urgent event based on a bus’s on-time arrival is an idiot — so I went downstairs and told the driver he should go back, and despite us both being pissed at the passenger, I could tell he felt the same way. He went on the intercom one more time and said he was turning around, but then enough people howled in protest that we ended up heading to Ann Arbor as scheduled, leaving the unknown passenger to fend for him/herself until the next Megabus comes through. With that bus not leaving Chicago until 4:45 p.m. CST, that comes out to an almost six-hour wait at the truck stop if there isn’t some other ride available. Ouch.
So what was the right course of action? After all, the passenger was at fault for not paying attention to the multiple announcements about being back to the bus on time. How would have you voted? Drop some ethical knowledge in the comments section and let me know. Also, give me a ride next time so I can avoid these philosophical quandaries.
As someone who once spent three weeks as a copy-edit intern, and thus as someone highly qualified to pass judgment on any copy-editing decision ever made, the following are my issues with the Atlantic headline “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
- The web is much bigger than Google;
- While it is mentioned several times, the article is not about Google itself;
- “Stupid” is a value judgment, and thus an inaccurate headline for an article that instead focuses mostly on the value-neutral, meta-thought-process changes wrought by the web.
On to the substance of Nicholas Carr’s piece: some yes, and also no.
I was reading a response to the article that notes how few of the piece’s critics will cop to having had a, “Hey, that’s cool, I’ll read this thing I found … oh wait, that looks cooler … what was I originally reading again?” experience. I will more than cop to that, as it happens to me almost every day. In one hour today I bounced between Newsweek, The A.V. Club, Rotten Tomatoes and several friends’ sites, to the point that it took me an average of 20 minutes to get through each article that would have taken five minutes without the distraction of the others. So yes, I do an incredibly greater amount of skimming online than I would in print.
But–always a but. Skimming online doesn’t mean I avoid skimming the newspaper, or even skimming the library. Back in the day I used to sit in this great, undisturbed backroom at the Carnegie Library picking out books on World War I or II, leafing through each one until a passage caught my eye and then putting the book back before moving on to another. (Lest you worry too much for my back-in-the-day social life, I did do plenty of things that didn’t entail sitting alone in libraries. But then I do have a strong nerd side, so it wasn’t an insignificant amount of reading.) The reality is that briefly glancing over things to find the meaty parts didn’t come along with the web.
And on the book tip, I think this paragraph is especially strange:
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
I do appreciate the link to Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0, which is right up my professional alley and which I hadn’t read before. But really, no more books and in-depth tomes? In the past two weeks I made it through Generation Kill and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I can safely say that my experience of each was in no way harmed by my Internet reading habits. A book is just a different experience: when I want wide-ranging and cursory, I’ll read online. (I’d say this brief familiarity with so many topics is more useful in a hugely varietal world than knowing just a few topics very well.) When I do want that informed look at just one topic, I pick up a book. I don’t think a failure to pick up a book is all that widespread among people who are reading a lot otherwise online; so many of the cultural touchstones for intelligent online readers of, say, The Atlantic continue to come from books. If you’re hung up on the printed format, we now have Kindle to bring books up to speed with other electronic publishing.
So yes, the web is restructuring how we consume media, and probably even restructuring our thought processes. It doesn’t mean older formats are going to be erased and crowded out. I think Carr makes this point himself in the last few paragraphs when he talks about the advent of writing, and of the printing press. Oral communication didn’t die with writing, nor will in-depth thought on a single topic die with the web.
The more forms of information that come along, the better.
Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight.