Comments on: Uneven depths: Why the printed page has always had room for scholarly brilliance and dirty jokes http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/07/uneven-depths-why-the-printed-page-has-always-had-room-for-scholarly-brilliance-and-dirty-jokes/ A collaborative effort to figure out the future of journalism. A project of Harvard University. Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:39:00 -0500 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Matthew Battles http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/07/uneven-depths-why-the-printed-page-has-always-had-room-for-scholarly-brilliance-and-dirty-jokes/comment-page-1/#comment-143010 Matthew Battles Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:19:28 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=20340#comment-143010 Over at my personal blog, Nick Carr checked in to point out that in the chapter I discuss in this post, he does consider the place of the bawdy and the tawdry—the early modern shallows, we might say—in the development of the deep page. The passage he points to is one of his masterfully concise and elegant summaries of intellectual history. "Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society. Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, 'more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.' ... "But the froth itself was vital. Far from dampening the intellectual transformation wrought by the printed book, it magnified it. By accelerating the spread of books into popular culture and making them a mainstay of leisure time, the cruder, crasser, and more trifling works also helped spread the book’s ethic of deep, attentive reading.... Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same." Carr's rejoinder is that, in neuronal terms, reading is reading; the underlying brain function (and the changes it creates) is the same, regardless of subject matter. But it hardly seemed that way to readers past. Over at my personal blog, Nick Carr checked in to point out that in the chapter I discuss in this post, he does consider the place of the bawdy and the tawdry—the early modern shallows, we might say—in the development of the deep page. The passage he points to is one of his masterfully concise and elegant summaries of intellectual history. “Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society. Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, ‘more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.’ …

“But the froth itself was vital. Far from dampening the intellectual transformation wrought by the printed book, it magnified it. By accelerating the spread of books into popular culture and making them a mainstay of leisure time, the cruder, crasser, and more trifling works also helped spread the book’s ethic of deep, attentive reading…. Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same.”

Carr’s rejoinder is that, in neuronal terms, reading is reading; the underlying brain function (and the changes it creates) is the same, regardless of subject matter. But it hardly seemed that way to readers past.

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