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Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet
Hugh Pickens was one of several readers to let us know that, according to a NY Times story, the 89-year-old Ray Bradbury hates the Internet. But he loves libraries, and is helping raise $280,000 to keep libraries in Ventura County open. "Among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. ... 'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.' ... The Internet? Don't get him started. 'The Internet is a big distraction,' Mr. Bradbury barked... 'Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,' he said, voice rising. 'They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.'"
There's a lot to be said for libraries. The other day, my wife came home with a new library card. Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.
This is my sig.
To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
It helps drive the economy forward. It helps people keep in touch. It allows people to access resources (such as Bradbury's works) they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
It's a shame how foolish and ignorant his remarks are.
Amnesty International
It's strange for someone so vehemently against censorship to be against propagating information to ANY media.
"It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
Sounds like hes boarding the firetruck as we speak.
Old Man Ray is also a flaming Republican. Sad to think of it since his work is so enjoyable but that's the long and the short of it. He went apeshit over Fahrenheit 9-11.
"No. 1, he didn't ask (permission), and, No. 2, he took it - period," Bradbury tells PEOPLE. "Even if he did ask, what he has done is a crime."
Speaking from his Los Angeles home Wednesday, the 83-year-old author says he never would have allowed Moore to use the name, "because it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to me. I have several new editions of the book coming out this summer. I have a new film version of Fahrenheit 451 with Mel Gibson starring, and it is going into production sometime in the next six months."
Bradbury says that Moore, 50, contacted him only last Saturday - months after the controversial movie started making headlines.
"He was embarrassed because he didn't want to call me," says Bradbury, adding that he felt Moore was "forced into" making the call and that the filmmaker hasn't offered to screen the film for him.
"He didn't want to face me," says Bradbury. "He is supposedly a big fan of mine and read my work years ago. Now suddenly he has to call someone he has been reading for most of his life and apologize for what he did."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It is truly a shame that he feels that way and that he believes in such a false dichotomy. If he was a little less antagonistic about the subject he'd see the massive influx of new people into the libraries that the internet has helped spur. The poor especially benefit from free access to computers and their children are put in touch with a wealth of learning (books AND electronic information) that is truly unprecedented. Library usage is up across the board, from what I can see.
The man is almost 90 years old, but he's younger than my grandmother who regularly uses email and praises it as a wonderful way of keeping in touch with her mobility-impaired friends. Age and stubbornness are not excuses for a man of his intelligence to hold such a myopic view of the world which HE HELPED CREATE. It makes me wonder if he has been to a library recently during business hours to see the throngs of people using the internet there to find jobs and better themselves.
âoeItâ(TM)s distracting,â he continued. âoeItâ(TM)s meaningless; itâ(TM)s not real. Itâ(TM)s in the air somewhere.â
Many critics of digital media complain that the information is not tangible, like a book or a record is. That you can't hold it in your hands. But last time I checked, how a book physically felt in your hands wasn't important to enjoying and understanding a book. You read with your eyes, not with your fingers (braille notwithstanding).
So really Mr. Bradbury, what's your obsession with being able to hold things? Sounds more like materialism and hoarding instincts or misguided nostalgia than a genuine concern for the Internet.
I disagree with that. The tactile feeling I get from reading a paper book adds much to my enjoyment, at least for me. I've never tried a kindle, but I can't stand reading text from sites like project gutenberg.
I can read a real book for 10 hours. I can only stand about 20 minutes of text on a computer screen.
I agree; what an idiot. T
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet. Or, are you starting out with the Martian Chronicle instead?
If anything, given the level of thought that the man has historically produced, you might find it instructive to understand what his criticisms are. If anything, it would only serve to improve the internet.
This is my sig.
Give the man a Kindle preloaded with more books than his library. All that, in the palm of your hand.
I am. A lot of people are scared by things they don't understand. Why should he be any different?
> Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line.
????
All it takes is a single suitable PDF on some guys laptop plugged into his mother's cable modem to make that claim bogus.
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
The net just makes it cheaper and easier for ANYONE to publish.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And yet more and more books (especially computer science related textbooks) are becoming easily and freely available online (sometimes legally, sometimes via rapidshare or torrents) for anyone who knows where to look -- far more easily than taking a trip to a library and picking up a dead-tree book. Right now, of course, there are some books that you can't find online and should head to the library for instead (or order off amazon...), but the percentage in this category is dropping constantly, and it'd happen even faster if people like Bradbury wouldn't be illogically resistant to change. What people seem to forget is that the internet isn't just a collection of websites with short articles or videos, it can be a source for sharing actual books (many of which your local library would probably not have). So it's got a quickly-growing library in it, and then other stuff too (the other stuff just tends to get focused on more).
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
That's rather the point of a library, is it not. The internet is not a library, because it does not have a librarian. The idea of a library is to have good material in it for a community to share in. The choices that the library makes are as much of a statement of humanity as anything else. When you use the internet, and filter noise yourself, you aren't getting the same level of service.
This is my sig.
Or is that in the air as well?
Ray Bradbury wrote some good books. One book in particular was truly great, providing a social commentary on the value of information and what it means to have open and free access. This makes him a man who was forward thinking for his time and perhaps means future societies will remember him.
Unfortunately, he's become a bit of a cranky old man. That's okay. I suppose he's earned the right to be one.
The value of his works shouldn't be diminished but certainly, time has passed him by.
Particularly ironic considering the events of the past week in Iran and the internet's enabling role in that continuing saga.
Just wanted to add that while the signal to noise ratio my be high, the signal is so incredibly strong that the noise is easy to filter out.
I could break down your arguments by saying things like, "Why rely solely on a book? If so inclined I could probably contact a few reputable PERL devs online and get real feedback and samples."
Books are great and have their place, but they pale very quickly when compared to the possibilities the internet offers.
Good-bye
So it's got a quickly-growing library in it, and then other stuff too (the other stuff just tends to get focused on more).
I would say the reason the other stuff gets focused on more is that there is more of it outright, if you could find any number of good websites that have factual checked data on whatever, there is at least 10 times that with incorrect data on the same subject. The problem happens is the majority is wrong, but is alot easier to find since it is the majority.
With the internet being mob filtered it almost always makes the info into what the mob wants to hear, or is what they are told they want to hear, regardless of the true facts.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
he grew up most of his life under the threat of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet. and it almost happened several times.
the whole book is about mankind gone mad, one obsessed with technology but with no wisdom about how it is to be used,
and a world in which nobody asks why we are doing what we are doing.
he is not against technology, he is against the misuse of technology. that is kind of the point of the whole book.
and as for the internet.... he kind of has a point. most of the 'development' is about 'doing it because we can', not 'why are we doing this at all'
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet.
Bradbury also wrote The Veldt. The first significant story about the hazards of deep immersion in interactive entertainment: particularly for children.
Writers of Bradbury's generation have some very interesting and perceptive things to say about "cocooning -" social isolation and a pathologically extended adolescence reinforced by the new technologies of instant communication.
There are some important tradeoffs between paper and digital media. I'm assuming we're talking about original works here and that e.g. transcribing a newpaper article doesn't count.
* Books aren't just rugged, they're also non-ephemeral in a way that web sites aren't. Much of the efficiency of the internet comes from cheap communication with centralized storage. But this means that whoever controls the storage has the power to change history. You can't change a million books in people's houses but old web pages can be lost or altered much more easily. When I go through my old del.icio.us bookmarks I often find 404s, which never happens on my bookshelf.
* The time and money needed for paper publishing creates an incentive for basic quality control. There are precious few copy-editors working on the net. Spelling, grammar, and basic comprehensibility all suffer as a result.
* Many popular formats on the internet (such as blogs) are inherently chronological. The focus is always on the latest information, and there's little incentive to improve or correct old content. Longer content is released a chapter (or section!) at a time. This is most visible (although less important) in webcomics, where the early art and storytelling can be orders of magnitude worse than the latest material.
* Books have total control over layout and formatting. Web content, which has to be viewed on everything from PCs to cell phones, doesn't. Formats such as PDF are much clumsier to use than HTML. Read Edward Tufte to find out why this is important.
* There is very little long-format content on the internet. A page or two of text is considered "long" for most purposes (in the context of Slashdot, how long is this comment? how long would it be on a printed page?). Several pages is huge, and a couple dozen pages is gargantuan. Meanwhile, even small books for children and short works of nonfiction are usually at least a couple hundred pages long. Short content is convenient (and thus popular), but there are ideas and levels of detail you simply can't reach in a few pages.
There are some exceptions to all of this, but the general trends still drive the way we communicate. And in general, books are longer, more expensive, better edited, and more thought out in advance, while web content is shorter, faster, cheaper, more accessible, more diverse, and lower quality. The net's advantages work better in shorter formats -- it's telling that the first (and most successful) things to be digitized were the letter/memo and the casual conversation, followed later by the want ad and article.
Will web content ever equal books? I don't know. Collections of related blog essays have been pulled from blogs, cleaned up, and published as books (Joel Spolsky's, for instance), which is a start. The Wiki might be a viable format, although I suspect open-content sites will never quite make it. Taking an idea from Fred Brooks, it may be that conceptual integrity is the most important factor in the quality of a written document, and it's hard to achieve that when you have a thousand editors. Good luck talking about it, though, since the net has a giant persecution complex vis-a-vis top-down control of publishing.
Here's an example of where I'm coming from: Recently I decided I don't know enough about biology. I took a class in high school when I was 15 and that's it (I'm 27 now). So I bought what appears to be the standard intro level college textbook (Campbell and Reece) and was blown away. Despite being full of detail, the explanations are clear, and nearly every page has one or more full-color pictures or diagrams. There are many asides that link the topics to everyday life. Each subsection has about as much content as an average blog post. The book is 1,400 pages long. It cost $140 and I consider it worth every penny.
There is nothing like this on the internet. But
Visit the
Libraries were never about pretense of the Librarian or even
of the local community. They were about having a large
collection of published works when acquiring suck works was a
highly expensive prospect.
Whining about the web or the internet is much like whining about
TV. It's very popular among the pretensious but all it really
demonstrates is that the whiners never really bothered.
Modern technology makes searching and filtering rediculously easy.
Beyond access to more information than you would have the money
to acquire on your own, that's all that a library provides.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Your way would win easily, until you consider how many of those wikipedia articles are what, 5-20 paragraphs? And how disjoint are your interesting tabs after an hour of browsing? It's mind-boggling how disparate the topics are after an evening of browsing. Then consider a single book, good luck finding one under 200 pages, and even a moderately focused book will bind your mind to a depth of thinking quite unlike most (though certainly not all) web pages.
There is much to be said for your way of reading, just as there's much to Mr. Bradbury's. There's also room for people whom do both, and I prefer a world where such variety runs rampant.