This particular line in the reading caught my attention... I never thought about my relationship with text under different media to how food is... either way, our interactions with text is consumption (as of course is food), but the way I treat reading a book versus reading online is very different...
I have many books that I have accumulated over the years. There are many books that I have still yet to read, but still I compulsively buy more and more books. I try to stop myself, but I can't. But when I do read a book, sometimes it can take me a couple of months to finish the book... depending on my schedule, sometimes even longer than that... But yet, I am very patient when it comes to reading... If I forget a portion, I will re-read it, and I do not get aggravated or flustered in anyway. I take my time to read, and yes it is like a slow home cooking. I can wait very patiently, hours on end, for my mother to complete dinner. Her dinner is well worth the wait, as is waiting to complete a book. But this type of attitude is definitely not attributed to how I interact with the Web.
I can see how the Web is like fast and convenient takeout. It's instant, you don't have to wait long to get the product, and you consume the product as soon as you receive it. But if the page takes too long to download, I would say maybe 3 minutes max, I become very agitated. I will exhale expletives at my computer screen and try to look at my connections to see if anything is loose. I would be a super-sleuth in trying to find out why my connection is "so slow." I suppose I am agitated when my Big Mac would take 10 minutes to be put into a bag as well. I can definitely say that my patience is very thin when it comes to the use of the internet and fast food service...
I must admit though, that I can be sucked into the Web for hours on end sometimes without realizing... I guess that can also be equated to junk-food addiction as well... The click of a mouse to have "instant reward" I think can be damaging. It sets a tone of not putting too much effort into it. As for a book I feel more accomplished when I complete it.
Yes--this is the tension Stroupe's essay between Elbow and Castro brilliantly deglazed into a print/digital media sauce. I truly salivated reading Greg Ulmer's quote," People wil not stop using print any more than they stopped talking when they became literate," that throws cold water into the boiling pot slowing down Bolton's late age of print theory.
ReplyDeleteI am just the kind of woman who rebels when presented with either/or strategies. I want my alphabet and eat too, months with a book and hours on the web, the full experience, why be stingy?
I also liked the food metaphor. Problem for me is consuming old-fashioned texts electronically is very, very difficult. I'm going to have to start printing these articles out. Maybe reading academic articles online is like putting ketchup on a Smith & Wollenskys filet? Or maybe I just had a failed metaphor.
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