Boy, is it ever! My answer when I read something—at least something good—is that all the stuff is going on in my head. Come on, Nick, get something going in yours!
Of course he was talking about an article he wrote for The Atlantic (presumably one with old-fashioned quiet text), and I suspect that he felt a nice injection of hyperbole might help him sell it. Another quote from Carr:
“"When printed books first became popular, thanks to Gutenberg's press, you saw this great expansion of eloquence and experimentation," says Carr. "All of which came out of the fact that here was a technology that encouraged people to read deeply, with great concentration and focus. And as we move to the new technology of the screen ... it has a very different effect, an almost opposite effect, and you will see a retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page."
That’s also sad.
Novelist and reviewer Lev Grossman’s prediction to NPR was a bit less dramatic and in line with a trend I’ve noticed over recent years anyway:
“More purchases will be based on brief excerpts. ‘It will be incumbent on novelists to hook readers right away," says Grossman. "You won't be allowed to do a kind of tone poem overture, you're going to want to have blood on the wall by the end of the second paragraph. And I think that's something writers will have to adapt to, and the challenge will be to use this powerfully narrative form, this pulpy kind of mode, to say important things.’”
This phenomenon of desperate attempts to keep the reader’s (or, in this case, viewer’s) attention reaches its nadir in TV shows like “Entertainment Tonight,” in which they hype some “revelation” repeatedly: “Later we reveal the secret Tom Cruise has been keeping about his daughter!” Eventually the revelation comes: She doesn’t like asparagus! But before the banality of the secret can sink in, we’ve been invited to wait for some other startling revelation coming in a few minutes. Sadly, milder forms of this con are beginning to show up in more legitimate news and entertainment programs.
Come back, Gutenberg, all is forgiven.
(In a moment, I reveal the secret meaning of life--but first, read my book, "Your Writing Coach"...a non-hype guide to writing your book or script.)
