Read More Books:

When someone like Derrida advises his students (the entire world) to read more, he is not saying that one will get more information out of books, but rather that, in books, one will get out of information. It is in this specific, phenomenological encounter that the illusions created by popular forms of media are most effectively shattered; even personal experience functions as merely a mouthpiece for propaganda until it is written down and incisively analyzed.

It follows that I am terrified in meeting millennials who piously insist that they can get the same sorts of “information” out of internet articles as they can out of books, and my dread is aggravated when these same upstarts label me a “Luddite” as I fumble to articulate my flabbergasted indignation. The pejorative is not even as injurious as that trend which it represents, one which is content to pass ignorance off as intelligence, to seek “information” at the expense of “knowledge” and “wisdom”, and, even in blatantly ignoring these distinctions, to profess that they are no worse off, simply because they disown their superiors and, by so doing, suicidally surrender their access to superior powers of mind.

What does it mean to say that books are at most tantamount to articles online? It is not only to ignore the modes of distribution, the institutions which empower them, and the natural strengths and weaknesses of each form of technology, past and present. Already we can see the intrinsic contradictions in an argument which pretends towards consistency: the institution isn’t criticized, but ignored, as though one could rebel against it by pretending that it does not exist, thereby invalidating the rebellion; the technology of the present is presumed to be superior to that of the past, though the term “Luddite” refers to a specific history.

Yet the true tragedy is in the margin by which one falls short of even modern developments in thought itself. If, for instance, we were to acknowledge the rather recent adage that “the medium is the message”, we should be forced to conclude that, insofar as such an adage is valid and true, the simple fact that books are NOT computer articles means that their respective messages are mutually nonexchangeable. The tradition of reading books is specific unto itself, as is the tradition of writing them; how can a mind, then, conceive of the experience as something so easily substituted?

[({DM.A.A.)}]