Just one more click for the road

      For an infomaniac like me, access to the Internet is a little like an alcoholic getting a free, all-you-can-drink pass at the local bar.  Only good on weekends and during happy hour.  I’ve mostly found this to be a good thing, since I’ve been hoovering up random bits of haphazard knowledge, facts, commentary (some benighted) and all the other flotsam and jetsam floating around the cultural soup since I learned how to read.

      As you know, however, the online world makes all this lubriciously easy, which can easily result in addiction (not that I wasn’t hooked already.)  Worse, a lot of very serious people are now warning that this spew of digital effluent is rotting our brains, destroying social bonds and reducing our ability to concentrate down to a few nanoseconds.  Naturally, I don't think any of this applies to me, since I am far too disciplined and self-possessed, utterly immune to cyberspace con jobs.  You're not gonna get me, buddy.

      Though I wonder.  Somehow early on I developed my own version of speed reading, swallowing up whole chucks of material at a time.  My wife challenged me over comprehension, and after I proved my case, I think she’d sign an affidavit stating that I can, in fact, retain a lot in a short amount of time.  When information only existed on the printed page, this might have been a helpful trick, but with the speed and profusion of digital content, perhaps I’ve let the cart get too far in front of the horse.

      I used to spend all Sunday reading at least three print newspapers cover-to-cover.  Now I can travel the same terrain, plus a bunch of blogs, emails and message chats, a few magazines and a number of newsletters, some of which you might find a little obscure (Construction Physics anyone?) before dragging my ass out of bed to start the day.

      This is not Deep Reading.  More like skipping stones across a still pond.  To be fair to myself, I usually down shift when stumbling onto something I really want to learn about and try to stay attentive long enough to actually absorb the information.  I’ll also give deference to the excellent writers out there, which are plentiful despite what you might hear, since style can be just as enriching as content.

      There’s no doubt that having such abundance of information is a real service to fiction writing.  I actually enjoy clicking off into Wikipedia to fill in some detail, or fact check as I go.  As a research tool, the Internet is a Ferrari compared to the horse and buggy approach we used in the past.  (Though as a rule of thumb, I trust but verify.) Three point corroboration is a reliable standard, though sometimes I’ll let it go at two.) 

      But does all this vast abundance make one a better writer?  I honestly don’t know.  I suspect not, since the best writers I can identify accomplished the task way before Steve Jobs got that digital twinkle in his eye.  More likely, it’s given some very good writers a chance to crank out a lot more work in a shorter time.  It’s given them a far bigger universe to examine and draw from.  It’s made the pursuit less lonely, since with a single click they can connect with their true friends and colleagues, find a little encouragement or respite before diving back in again.   Though perhaps this ease of communications has created more distractions than benefits, more excuses to avoid rather than compose.  And worst of all, a degradation of their ability to concentrate on their own private, quiet thoughts, from whence derives their actual brilliance. 

     Nevertheless, whatever the pros and cons, this is the world in which we’re living.  There’s no going back. The only thing a person can do is make the best use of the situation.

      Try to extract the benefits without being corrupted by all the destructive clamor.