A Matter Of Quality

By Teresa Jusino

No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college.
- Nadia, 15, author of “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad”
(and yes, that’s how she spelled ‘dying’)

A recent New York Times article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, discusses the ongoing debate as to whether or not reading things online is actually reading.

I’ve always been a staunch defender of the web as a source of both entertainment and information, and challenged those who are quick to pooh-pooh the internet as intrinsically inferior. As I began the Times piece, I was preparing a rebuttal against the internet naysayers. Then I came to this:

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.

“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.”

Suddenly, I was pooh-poohing the internet along with its critics. She wants to be an English major, be a writer, and get published?! She can’t even spell dying, or be bothered to use spell-check! She can’t even be bothered to read other books to see what her competition is up to! Never mind that as an English major in college she’ll be required to do much more reading than she ever had to do in high school, and for which she will be unprepared without practice. Whoever’s not telling her that she “should read more books to get into college” is doing her a grave disservice.

This article got me thinking about why the naysayers are naysaying. It also got me thinking about why I, an avid internet user, love to read and don’t see the internet as a threat to literature.

I realized that mine is the last generation to know what life was like before the internet. The internet was only a baby when I began junior high in the early nineties, and I didn’t have my first e-mail address until I was about 15 or 16 when I heard about this new thing called Hotmail, where you didn’t have to have AOL in your home to have e-mail! You could have an e-mail address for FREE that you could check from anywhere! Hotmail was dope!

But what was I doing all those years before the internet? I was reading – anything and everything I could get my hands on. When I was little, trips to the library (you know, that place where you could borrow books before you could sit in Barnes & Noble and read them for free, or buy them used on Amazon.com?) were a treat, and I always came home with a stack of books almost as tall as I. Reading was highly encouraged in my house, and we never had to be forced to read. And while television tried to compete for our attention, and my older brother and sister bemoaned the fact that I was growing up at a time when VCRs could record TV shows so I could watch them whenever I wanted, we didn’t have as much to distract us from our reading as children do today. The internet was a luxury, not a necessity, and it was rare to have a friend who had a home computer, let alone the internet. Times being what they are, I suppose kids today can’t be blamed for not being as interested in the printed word. Today’s high schoolers have never known life without the internet, and have myriad media sources pulling them in all directions. How can they be expected to sit still and read when they are under constant assault by things flashing, flipping, and scrolling on screens?

Yet, even back before the internet there were debates about what constituted reading. I remember teachers making the distinction between reading books (the preferred option) and magazines (fluff) or comics (not reading at all). Medium, it seems, has always been an issue in the ongoing debate about literacy.

The thing is, at least to me, what you read is more important than how you read. Whether you’re reading on a screen or on the printed page doesn’t matter. If it did, books on tape (gulp! CD! I’m only 29 and I’m technologically SO OLD!) wouldn’t be considered reading either.

It’s a matter of quality, and this is where I think the internet naysayers have it right. Just as there’s a difference between reading The Brothers Karamazov and The Devil Wears Prada, there’s a difference between reading The New York Times online and reading fan fiction. There’s a difference between reading your favorite author’s serialized short stories on their website, and reading Joe Schmoe’s ranting and raving about his personal life on his blog.

It’s a matter of quality, and this is the internet’s biggest flaw…it’s all chiefs and no Indians. It’s all writers and no editors. It’s made up of people who have a great deal to say, but don’t put much thought into how they want to say it. There’s no one out there calling the shots, sending these people back home until they learn how to spell, or at least learn to proofread and utilize their spell-check function. There’s no one critiquing them on their inability to write a coherent sentence. For every blog or website that has an editorial staff ensuring some kind of quality (thank you Lisa and Julianna!), there are a million others set up by people who may or may not care about silly things like that. I found it amusing that 15-year-old Nadia thinks that because she writes stories online without reading anything else that that alone puts her on the road toward becoming a writer and getting published. If she somehow manages to coast through college and catch a literary agent on a very good day, there’s still the matter of dealing with the editor of a publishing house who will go through every word she writes with a fine-toothed comb, providing a rude awakening.

And this is the greatest strength of The Book. The Book has passed before many pairs of eyes before being published and in your hands. The Book has been written, rewritten, and edited so the reader receives it in the best possible version. When you read a book, you are guaranteed a certain level of quality. Say what you might about “beach reads” like The Devil Wears Prada. I promise you it’s written a million times better than Jane Doe’s Whine-A-Long Blog.

The internet isn’t going away, nor should it, and I believe that eventually what we consider “literature” will come to include the internet in a big way. Battles have always raged between high-brow and low-brow forms of art, and that won’t go away either. However, for the sake of children like Nadia, the debate right now shouldn’t be about whether reading on the internet is “actually reading,” but about how to ensure a certain level of quality. The only way this can happen is if we include the internet in our discussions about literature. By including it, we can develop standards for it. We can encourage more of our good authors to include more of their work online. We can begin to differentiate between the “beach reads” and the “serious literature” to be found there. Most importantly, we can go online with our children and help them make those distinctions in the current internet climate. Fiction from The New Yorker is just as readily available as the latest webcomic, and while I don’t think teenagers will necessarily be flocking to read New Yorker fiction, I do believe they can be encouraged to surf toward challenging content. I believe teenagers want to be challenged just as much as they want to challenge, but we have to believe in them. Criticizing their medium of choice doesn’t help. What I think will is helping them navigate it and teaching them not to accept mediocrity, no matter what its form.

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. Also, she has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which is now being rivaled by her burgeoning crush on Robert Downey Jr. in his Iron Man suit.