While I agree with Jason’s basic premise – that books and “new media” can work together toward a synthesis – it is however seldom the case that a great deal of crossover occurs. Book-friendly people tend to avoid the blaring, glaring, hyperkinetic style that pervades most visual media today. At best, they find it less than informative and at worst, a terrible superficial distraction. Likewise, those who get most of their input from television and the internet tend to read much less. Both groups display a tendency to disparage the media and habits of the other. It would be a perfect world if such overlap were widespread, but in reality this idea that someone reads something online, then gets a book to further investigate, is a rare thing confined to people who are already inclined to read books in the first place. At best, they read something in a blog, then go to Wikipedia for more detail, then end their quest because, in their minds, the internet has “all the answers.” (This attitude and practice growing among high school and even college students, who think citing Wikipedia is as solid and reliable as any classic reference work.)

It’s obvious that visual and internet media can deliver some content and message effectively. Newspaper subscriptions are down, but newspaper readership via the internet is way up. The explosion of YouTube suggests the possibility that the popularity of web video could be utilized to deliver information normally relegated to books. Weblogs and podcasts both offer dynamic methods of delivering information, with interactive capabilities impossible through books.

But it’s also clear that at this point in the technological timeline, books are capable of providing more in-depth analysis and more information than any other media. While this may not remain true always, video and internet media seem more oriented to the “now happening” rather than analysis of the “what happened.” Books also provide a form of information storage and retrieval which does not expire or become invalid because of some change in (often proprietary) data formats. In other words, a book published in 1980 is still readable today, whereas data stored on the primary method of 1980 data storage will be all but inaccessible today. Internet media is at this time as volatile as it is dynamic; the proper storage and display of information contained in your blog is dependent on software, web hosting, internet access, and a variety of other factors. To access a book, you need only acquire it and open it in a well-lighted space.

At this time, books are far superior forms of information containment and transmission. But this will not remain true forever. Technology may someday change what we think of as a “book,” just as it has already affected our habits of reading. The idea that it must be fully this or that, one way or the other, is reductionist, binary thinking – typical of most Americans of course, but hardly worthy of serious, intelligent debate.

Some would argue that television, music, gaming, and other massively popular (the phrase is chosen with care) media change our culture much more than reading and writing do. Much more potently, anyway.

Without reading, would I have developed this strong sense of social irresponsibility? Probably not: I would’ve accepted received wisdom.

Plenty of people accept the “received wisdom” precisely through reading. The Bible, Qur’an, Mahābhārata, or what have you.

Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it’s time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the “gateway drug” approach to reading, as opposed to the “whole wheat” approach.

That’s quite a ‘modest proposal’, Jake. Of course, I notice that you’ve chosen a couple of particularly salacious examples for these ‘under the counter’ books. Would your approach work as well for Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne as for Anaïs Nin or Chuck Palahniuk.

Still, on a marginally more serious note, if no one reads, then who will write the challenges to cultural, legal, social, and technical problems? And who will read them? That, implicitly, is what many of hand-wringers worry about. Johnson might argue, perhaps correctly, that those challenges will come from visual media, and that’s possible—but I’m not sure visual media can match the depth of depth of text.

I think I would say that the visual media have as much to offer by way of ‘culture war’ as books do, and sometimes more. Compare Morgan Spurlock’s documentary film, Super Size Me, to Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation, which largely inspired it. Schlosser’s book, though full of valuable information, is just about impossible to read; whereas, Spurlock’s film had a major impact on me. And his documentary television series, 30 Days, which has just embarked on its third season, is continuing this tradition of thought-provoking and culturally relevant visual programming. I don’t think you have to sacrifice one for the other — both books and other media can, I think, work in tandem to precipitate the evolution of culture.