David Brooks waxes poetic about value of books

July 8, 2010 NYT. Jan Bujan hipped me to this article. David Brooks, in "The Medium is the Medium" shares data about how getting kids started on home libraries helps stop the "summer slide." The article goes on to weigh in on the debate about whether book reading is better than internet reading. Here's the core of that argument:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books
to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces
the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see
themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as
members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is
the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the
way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person
who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe.
There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the
bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great
writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and
hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit
that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes
hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had
been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary
America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than
the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant
activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph
Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being
cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about
current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also
helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in
those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering
significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have
to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse
yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the
teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The
Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture
still produces better students.