Books aren’t going anywhere – despite the threat of robot sonneteers
The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age
Edited by Paul Socken
McGill-Queens, 244 pages, $34.95
From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution
By Peter Swirski
McGill-Queens, 252 pages, $29.95
If the experts are to be believed, dear reader, you are doing something quite exceptional right now. Namely, you are reading.
"But, historically speaking, new literary technologies have always been met with skepticism, and often hysteria. People have been freaking out about the death of literature literally since the time literature was invented – ever since Socrates bashed the alphabet in Plato’s Phaedrus. Since then, the printing press, the paperback, the typewriter, the telegraph, radio, film, television – all were supposed to have killed off “real” deep reading, with disastrous, wide-ranging social consequences.
The sky has fallen on literature so many times that we can be forgiven for approaching the latest round of digital doom-saying with some skepticism of our own. For all the protestations that “it’s really different this time,” sometimes it seems like people just get off on prophesying gloom."
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