Daniel Brent Patton

Product Content Strategy & UX Writing

Alan Wall’s A Defence of the Book, and especially it’s ongoing comment parade, make for interesting reading. It takes the debate to the summer of ’07 anyway: I tell you this pendulum swings like the stock markets nowadays. (For context, read more about Wall.) While it occurred to me that Wall and several in his audience confused the steps in the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy, a few actually hit the nail on the head:

What is getting under my skin about this post is that it is couched in terms of a high-minded respect for education and intelligence, when it is in fact a confused conflation of information with its medium, and a snobbish and reactionary attack on the democratic dissemination of knowledge.

Wall began his article with an attack on a conference presenter (with “digitally endowed pockets” no less) predicting the end of the book. And while I wasn’t there myself, I feel fairly comfortable in asserting that neither this “Gizmo Gus” nor any other e-vangelists out are announcing the end of literature. By the end of the article, I began to feel bad for this guy. He’s shooting the messenger. In the interest of full transparency, I’ll offer that I only read the first paragraph before printing the article “for closer reading.” My defense, if I may think out loud for a moment, is not that I can’t read closely online—how many web annotating tools and PDF annotating tools and even audio annotating tools are there now, a bazillion?—I’ve just developed over the years a guerrilla approach to screen reading. It’s necessary for the work I do (as I’m sure it is to many) to extract the bullets from large quantities of data so that I may act on it. If I want to read Paradise Lost, surely I’ll read a book. But, having turned its final leaf, is not my contemplation of the work—that rational coming to terms with its effect—simply the minds attempts to bullet-ize? Perhaps then the Web is the great rational plains and books are emotional boats. Until the electronic book truly arrives (I think this is a “when” and not an “if”), we as travelers must let destination dictate vehicle.