The Edge Of The Precipice: Why Read Literature In The Digital Age?

When purchasing a book, a buyer drives or walks to their local bookstore, opens the shop’s door, feels a gust of wind hit their face as the air in the room becomes disturbed from the opening of the door, and searches through rows and rows for what they fancy. When looking at prospective purchases, the customer studies at the front cover, picks up the book, reads the summary, and brushes their thumb against the pages, letting them flow in a steady stream towards the opposite direction. This helps the buyer determine if he or she wants to purchase the book. After they find what they want, they walk to the register (if there’s a line, they wait), pay for their book, and they walk out the door, being hit by the outside air. Then, they travel home …show more content…
edited by Paul Socken, is about how the author believes in physical possession. Furthermore, it is about the internet in modern day society. The essay compares empty bookshelves and full ones, and books and e-books. The author talks about how his parents loved books and how they always made sure he had some. He ends the essay noting that he believes children will have a happier life if they had paper …show more content…
"The Net seizes our attention only to scatter it," he writes. "We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we 're distracted by the medium 's rapid-fire delivery of competing mes- sages and stimuli" (118). Whether we like it or not, we are exchanging a brain that can focus on a single message for a long period of time for what Carr calls "the juggler 's brain," whose cravings for complexity are satisfied by paying attention to multiple messages, and multiple media, at the same time — a valuable skill to be sure, but not the same skill as focusing on a single narrative, or a single plot, for hundreds of pages at a