Good timing.

Had to drive to a conference, but couldn't manage it for various reasons. So, I have the weekend to do a lot of thinking. I just finished "Embrace the Wide Sky" (Daniel Tammett) and was inspired to do something productive, but couldn't. I've been *so* scattered that I've been catching myself getting distracted within distractions.

Just tonight I've been thinking of vanishing from the web for a while. And, as I thought about it, I had a burst of tweets. A very big burst. No problem tweeting.

In the time it took to type this short comment, I've jumped back and forth between a bunch of other sites. So, I don't even know if this comment makes any sense.

Gotta get off the grid.

Thank you for writing this piece. I hope it wakes some people up to the fact that books still are, and ALWAYS will be, irreplaceable, and they're the only things in this world that can transport us miles away for free.

I used to fancy myself somewhat of a wordsmith. I prided myself on my writing. But years of living in a foreign country and relying on the internet for my intellectual sustenance have eroded the quality of my words. I am ashamed of this fact. I've also subsisted on sound bites, and wikis, and OMGs and celebrity tweets and facebook updates...when none of these things are lasting or meaningful. It's junk food for the brain, and my brain has indeed atrophied.

I will also vow to read every day. There's nothing like the smell of an old book, anyway.

Roger. I love you. And I share your progressive views on just about everything.

But you were way more interesting when you popped up only on Friday mornings (and yes, Sunday afternoons) to share your thoughts on cinema.

It is from there, the prism of professional criticism, that you conveyed your intellect, good nature and moral authority best.

Your Tweets are redundant.

I'll bet that by the end of this decade the people who speak the least on the internet will be the most interesting.

Get ready for The Big Crunch.

One of the best things about twitter is that I can find people like you :) I didn't know who you are or what you do, yet now I do.

To ensure we don't become too shallow, I think it is necessary to meditate/think about the info. and knowledge we acquire.

This post sung in my (rewired?) brain. Just today I tweeted that I couldn't focus on any of the many books I wish to read. It took me leaving the room with the computer to even make a valid attempt at serious reading.

I used to live in NYC and had a long subway commute during which I read. Working as a teacher was an interactive experience and required preparation and thought. I didn't have cable or Internet at home and I read there, too. Now I drive to work, am on a computer all day and hang out on twitter and read blogs in my free time. I only joined the social media world in the last couple months so maybe it's the novelty that's holding my attention, but I fear that it is the sense of community and mass of information I crave. Maybe instead I should channel those impulses by returning to school or starting a book club. I don't know. I'm not sorry to be in this virtual world, but I also don't want to lose my connection to the printed word and the depths/heights it alows one to explore.

I'm not so sure about our brains being rewired (I've still got to sit down with the latest WIRED issue) but that the internet with twitter and blog comments allow the superficial to rise to the top much easier than the deep. It's easy to spout off the first thing that comes into your mind without taking any proper amount of time to think about it.

Maybe blog comments need a mechanism that forces a reader to wait a certain period of time before they can post their thoughts.

An example is the initial reaction LOST's ending. After the episode was over many immediately voiced their anger over how the show ended. Some of those same people a day or so later have now changed their minds. They now get the ending a like it.

The end of LOST required time to process. It wasn't a frisson. This blog Mr. Ebert, isn't a frisson.

Excellent words. I like your approach to Twitter, it hass influenced the way I use the service. I also relate with the concept of losing an hour. Before I started following you I pretty much followed anyone halfway decent. Now, my bar is raised. I enjoy your blog as well. Thank you.

"But how is my reading of long 19th century novels coming along? Not very well."

I, too, find it ironic that the thing I love best (reading a truly good book) is the thing I never seem to have time for.

When reading, my neck often gets very sore from bending to see the page. Have you any advice on how to read comfortably?

Ebert: A pillow in your lap.

Hello Rog,

it's been some time since I have commented here and properly. Know what it feels like to come back? Hint -- it's the name of a film made by a director whose work I grow increasingly fond of, Kelly Reichardt. Like yourself, I had vowed not to become a twit, I quote myself from your "Books Do Furnish A Life" entry of last year --

"Ebert: Readers, this will strike you as decidedly odd, but I have decided to try out twittering.

http://twitter.com/ebertchicago

This is one winged creature which shall keep it's uropygium determinedly bivouacked here betwixt these principally hirsute chested raconteurs. This unfledged recalcitrant literary arriviste votary of yours, cannot be importuned to squeak, cheep, tweet or, chirrup at any venue but this, replete with sophisticates that are sumptuous paramours of elusory cinema and felicitously bereft of subfuscous antediluvian cerebra cudgeled by phthisis.

Your perfervidly sedulous,
Indian Idiot (H.W.)"

Forsooth it is a foolish thing to second guess one's own abilities over those of Roger Ebert. I am now having to eat my own words, or rather I am "tweeting" my own words @pantherauncia as you know, although like Ginsberg, I am overly given to editing myself, quite unlike your free flowing melodious Kerouac like style of chirping, haikuesque in its concision.

Now, to the subject of this entry of yours and to the frisson I am having writing this post (for the two are I think related) -- I agree completely, our attention is far more easily distracted, perhaps to our detriment, aye there's the rub, perhaps. I remember you being quoted in an interview that you are enjoying twittering as it requires a certain discipline. Then there's the small matter of the legion of over 1,50,000 *registered* followers you now have, many of them Ebertricians/Ebertonians (Hi Marie BIG WAVE I've MISSED YOU SO!) and then there's the unknowns and the unknowables, for instance should the people who had first started making etchings on cave walls (I find myself citing our prehistoric ancestors often, I wonder why..) have known that many ages after their basic attempts at attempting to maintain a record and initiating methods and modes of communication, this complex and wide ranging a network would pop up, it is pretty much a given I think that their pace would have become somewhat more frenetic, considering once we know what works and works well, we tend to do a lot of it, until it becomes sort of redundant and we end up replacing it with something else, usually better. I don't know, I guess I'm saying enjoy your reading and enjoy your tweeting and be thankful that it wasn't a Ray Kurzweil piece you read, because he makes some bold, but not entirely implausible statements which might make you convert your library into a panic room.

Now to the related matter of the frisson I am having writing this, good god the joy, oh sweet letters look how you are flowing from thoughts into the tips of my fingers and onto the screen, without that cursed 140 character limit! At the end of that last line, I had written five hundred and fifteen words and three thousand and thirty three characters -- old joy indeed, so pleasant that I brought god into the matter not something I do often, or with pleasure, but this is a special occasion. I find the whole twittery business to be a bit of a nightmare, I'm still adjusting I guess..

Last bit of business --

petition to get Marie Haws onto twitter, because if I can, anyone can and Marie even knows things like html tags and all that funky beeswax, stuff I've never gotten my pea shaped, pin sized brain around.

My next tweet, which I request you and the whole tweeto-sphero-verse to re-tweet is this --

"Get Marie Haws on twitter, by any means necessary, it is greatly impoverished without her charming & witty presence."

I just checked and saw that I managed to write that with characters to spare, so I'm chucking that in also.

Lallalalalalalalalalalalalalalalallllaalalalalaaaaa..

the freedom of unlimited characters is intoxicating!

As ever,

your perfervidly sedulous,

Indian Idiot (H.W.)

Why don't you... write about books?
It will be such a pleasure to read those things.

Anyway, I don't think that frissons are the only things that addict you to the internet. What keeps me personally coming back to the internet is the essays. It is such a massive depository of awesome essays that it is my first choice when I don't know what to do.

Thanks for another insightful column.

The guitarist is actually a man named Ronnie Moipolai. The enigmatic man behind the guitarist is Ronnie's brother KB, waiting for his turn on the guitar! Here he is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54fu9MPiL4

Ebert: I've corrected my intro to the link.

Bravo. I feel the same way. Well put, Roger. Well put.

Sometimes, I wish I could know what it's like to read a book without having been inculcated by TV, movie, and web images since birth. Would creating a mental visual be easier or more difficult? Dickens might know. Ebert might know.

I guess it's just easier to find a frisson in little things like twitter, sports or video games, instead of finding them in "serious" things, like a book, a painting, a film (art in general). Why would people want to go find frissons where they are hard to find, if they can find them right around the corner? Maybe this whole thing is just another thread that questions the objective of art nowadays.

As always you make me smile and make me think. I totally agree. There are times every day when I find my self experiencing frisson... Like earlier today when I remembered I had the complete Essays of Michel Montaigne on my shelf unread, or when I was feeling down and useless when it came to my writing only to find a few minutes later that inspiration had arrived for me in the form of a quick monograph on Jewish culture in art and expression... Another great example was today when I saw a story online about the world's largest horned Dinosaur- and it was from Mexico! I had never even thought of these two words (Mexico and Dinosaurs)in the same context before. The world is an amazing thing, and twitter I find is an interesting way to look at and discover these moments of frisson. I wrote this today and it sort of seems apt: We feel, we do not see, the cultures and the people that do the most to make us human. Sight is a sense that is used only as a last resort; expression is the mode of conception that is made for the most sublime elements of life. I love following you on twitter and I hope you look me up sometime! Maybe I will lead you to a moment of frisson... who knows! http://twitter.com/byronNME

Time management and wish fulfillment. Can't have the other without the one. And short-term/petty wish fulfillment can eat your time alive! Beware!

Frisson someone your own size. Or someone bigger or smaller. It's a pay-forward thing.

RIP Dennis Hopper. If I were casting his 80's-and-beyond self for the biopic, I'd go with poet/actor S A Griffin. Told Mr. Griffin so when he brought his Poetry Bomb through Phoenix some weeks ago. They seem much alike to me.

Better not take up any more of your time . . .

I think the guitarist in the video is a man named Ronnie, my friend. :)

Great post.

Ebert: This is a matter for debate. Cynthia believes Ronnie is a woman, and so do I. The (illiterate) comments are misleading. The head scarf and the smile seem womanly to me.

This is so correct! I finished Anna Karenina and thought I could conquer the world. Began War and Peace and... wondered what everyone was up to on Twitter. I don't regret it, though, the feeling of connection with, and the interesting glimpses into, so many different lives.

Fortunately for you, you are able to be incredibly productive at the same time -- and you ARE a great tweeter.

Maybe I'll go and have a look at War and Peace again... right after I check my Twitter feed.

I'm always skeptical to say that attention spans have gotten shorter. I think I'd be more in favor of saying easier distractions have become more abundant.

With a remote, TV is no longer something one has to get up off the couch to turn on, and even worse, get up AGAIN to turn the channel. The internet is ALWAYS "right there." Everyone has a computer. Even ten years ago, at least for my family, that wasn't true.

The pastimes enjoyed by yesteryear just seem to require so much EFFORT now, and involvement. It's not that we've lost our attention spans, I think. It's just that it's just plain easier to not pay attention.

I've come to that conclusion because, when necessary or desired, we CAN focus, and just let a movie or a book envelope our consciousness. I'm not exactly an avid reader, but I've put away novels in a day before, just because they were so good. I sat through Peter Jackson's King Kong without squirming.

I think if someone detonated an electromagnetic bomb or whatever, knocking all of our various media systems out, we'd be surprised with just what would entertain us in its absence.

This is a truly remarkable coincidence. For the last few months I have been spending my spare time on the internet (being a part-time student without a job "spare time" can be quite considerable most days). Most often I would frequent facebook with friends, reading articles from National Geographic, Popular Science, IMDB, your own website, and as well as others on twitter.

Just this last week I felt my mind was mushy, my mood standoffish, and my personality a little dull as opposed to my usual sharp wit and good humor. I realized that it was to do with my internet use, and isolation from the real world. I figured the usual cliché that "the brain is like a muscle, you must work it and feed it well," should be put to use.

So early this week I went camping in the Sierra Nevadas for a few days with friends isolated off from the technological world, and the day after I got back I went to the bookstore. I just finished Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" and I am onto Crime and Punishment now.

Before my trip I took an IQ test to see where I was. Previously I have tested around 152 when I was a full time student and not using the internet very much. My pre-trip and reading IQ at the beginning of the week was 128, and post-reading was 139. This all has occurred before today.

While I love your articles and thoughts on life Roger, Im afraid Im going to only be checking in with your blogs and reviews once a week or so now, in the interest of enjoying them to a fuller depth with a stronger mind.

Keep up the good work.

Wow Roger ...if I may call you Roger,

I just experienced a few frissons with this piece you wrote.

The first reading your tweet! I thought maybe you want a frisson horse; which I happen to think are sooo beautiful.

As I read on(frisson)I felt as though you were saying good bye to your followers. Whew.. I was glad that wasn't It.

Another when you wrote about Brain study by the UCLA professor.

Yet another when you wrote about computer games. Oh you are definitely going to like them. Lets just say your experiment with computer games will be part of daily exercise routine. How this? 20 minutes a day of "Hand & Eye Coordination". :-))

I must confess that I am new to this and spend most of my time working with little time to tweet; but I'm working on that.

Being new to twitter I of course experienced many frissons as I browsed the site seeking interesting people and organizations to follow.

I certainly experienced one when I found you on twitter!

I am big fan. I believe form the inception of the show on Channel 11. I Hope I don't offend you by stating you were the original "Simon Cowell" of movie critiques. "Roger Cowell"? Nah never.

Your movie reviews were at times so spirited and thought provoking. Even if I didn't agree with your review I had to respect the fact that you made me think.

I learned that approach from watching Siskel interact with you!

I am glad you will still make time to tweet

Wishing you all the best,

Pasha

Roger:

You may want to read Georg Simmel's essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life", written in 1903 (if you haven't already). It has to do with urbanization in the early 20th century and the effects of the modern city on individuals. He discusses something similar to "frisson", what he calls “intensification of nervous stimulation" - the constant need for those little jolts. Although it was written over a century ago, the essay is eerily prophetic and especially relevant in our postmodern society. Here is a link:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:b0lJlC2II8MJ:www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf+georg+simmel+the+metropolis+and+mental+life&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShVCogFXhtujmIyZerxI4ckSCKgxIeeiW6IsjMSBnA-WQghehnnEU1Sq1p2IgfCd_om-NqVxgakAPb_LEiIrmPvDYqRXVQfqPbbtOF_yGdOMwIUgmzmbuT0OB8PjvHy-lJQoAvR&sig=AHIEtbTqMv_2qpPa3mA4E2orWso5kxrSoA

brooke

Welcome to the Internet, Mr. Ebert! Now you're just like all the rest of us net zombies. :-D

The best - and the worst - thing about the Web is how much interesting stuff there is out there. I read somewhere recently - and I have no intention of claiming these are exact data - that presently there are about 1700 *years* worth of videos up on YouTube. Let's suppose this is true. Think about it. Even if there were only about 1% of things on YouTube really worth watching, that would still mean spending at least seventeen years glued to the computer screen.

I really enjoy the Internet, but that's a frightening idea.

It means that if I want to capture even a tiny piece of all that awesomeness out there, I have to evaluate individual Internet offerings really, really fast. That in itself wouldn't be a problem but this attitude quickly bleeds out elsewhere: into movies, TV shows, books, music and yes, even computer games. In the end, instead of enjoying what I already found, I’m constantly on the move, looking for bigger and better things out there. It’s all about the thrill of the hunt. Once I capture another interesting book or movie or whatever, I immediately lose interest for it and move on to the next thing.

After 10 years of surfing a web, there’s a whole pile of unread books in my room and a bunch of movie DVDs gathering dust. I’m seriously considering cutting down the time I spend on the Web but, then again, I’ve been saying this for the better part of the decade.

I saw an interesting idea on one blog recently: an Internet-free day. You pick up one day of the week and, during it, steer clear of the Internet – or maybe even computer in general. It also might help to have some alternate activities lined up for such time: spending some quality time with family or friends, books to read or hobbies like photography. In my case, I carefully selected lighter, short story collections to read (at least for the time being), prepared several movies I’d like to watch and bought myself a couple of notebooks for writing diary or story ideas or movie reviews or whatever else might catch my fancy at the moment. It doesn’t sound like much but it might be a good start.

Now if I could only muster the will to begin this…

Roger,

I apologize for commenting in the wrong space, but your memorial to Dennis Hopper wasn't a blog post and didn't have an option. I'm very disappointed with all the usual network news-type sources for not mentioning one of Hopper's greatest movies, but imagine my surprise when I read your tribute and found you'd left it out too. Can you guess? Probably. Yes, that would be "True Romance" and the great 'Sicilian Scene'. I'm a little amazed you would mention "Waterworld" over that. (Not that "Waterworld" was as bad a pic as many have made out.)

I think very few actors could have performed that famous scene as beautifully as Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. Whether people liked the movie or not, that scene stands as a classic. Thank you for letting me point that out.

From one cantaloupe to another. :)

I have always held a fascination for how the world works. Actually, it is more of a fascination with how everything works. People, the universe, God. It is a lot to tackle; even in a limited way, and to do it right would require more than a single lifetime: probably several life times. However, I am basing the assumption of the several life times requirement on having the same faculties and such as I have now. What if I were much smarter, or more simple-minded?

Therein lays the blessing of the internet and modern technology in general. No one could possibly have more than a casual knowledge of all subjects, no matter how determined. Yet the accelerated pace provided by the internet counter-balances the brevity of an eight decade long life span, to some extent. Every sort of knowledge is only a few keystrokes away. Countless books. Industry-standard software. All free. So many wonders, so little time. It is all so very frissonistic. (I don’t know who is doing what to whom, or why, and I don’t care. I think the internet is like life: it is what we make of it, given our circumstances.)

I have a certain repugnance to jealousy, considering it a horrible inclination. Yet, if I were to be jealous it would be of someone who could write at a Pulitzer Prize level, play the piano—probably well, travel the globe, hold conversations with the most fascinating people, and is also an accomplished artist. The art in particular is envy-worthy. I read a well-respected art instructor state that no one living today could draw like the folks in the Renaissance. That is not the case. Ebert’s drawings are at that level. The courage and self-confidence required to follow one’s intuition is evident in the lines of ink. There is no reluctance, no hesitation, only a confident flow. The tilted ellipsis on the wine glass in one of the drawings recently displayed is evidence enough. I have not seen any living person’s drawings retain such audacity, and survive.

I have often wondered what the secret is at having these abilities. Certainly much is inborn, yet few are able to retain those blessings. The active viewing of movies and the profuse reading seem to offset the mindnumbing effects of today’s superficial culture.

[The internet] is turning us into shallower thinkers

It isn’t for me. I’ve never worked so hard or learned so much.

One reason meaningless celebrities dominate all of our national media is that they are meaningless.

Ahhh, stop picking on celebrities. I say that not knowing or caring who they are. (Except for the Florence Nightingale syndrome I have developed for one particularly abused individual.) In any event, if someone could somehow figure out a way to get Adler and Van Doren’s project reenergized—even on a small scale—that would be a real public service.

I began to notice sometime a couple of years ago that the majority of online forum discussions consisted of one person posting a summary of breaking news, followed by a chorus of increasingly reductive remarks whose sole purpose, it seems, was to establish a "Yea" or "Nay" consensus.

When I realized I was getting little out of these discussions, I took stock and discovered to my chagrin that I had been just as guilty as anyone else of flooding the Internet with the typing equivalent of talking to hear myself speak. Since then, I have made a conscious effort to only respond to discussions when I have something to offer that I feel could reveal a new dynamic, or--better still--when I have a question for another poster that I think might get something interesting to happen. Maybe a reconsidered opinion; perhaps a spirited debate; it's not important what the consequence is, so long as there is something more substantive than "Epic fail" or "FTW" in response.

Last year, I participated in a very surprising discussion in a thread on a forum about the Pixar film "Up," in which several of us explored some of the themes of the story (loss, finding oneself, etc.). What had begun as a discussion about whether the movie would be more popular than, or out-gross, "WALL-E" became instead a sort of group therapy session where some very personal experiences were shared. It reaffirmed my belief that, since the Internet is malleable, we must take responsibility for it ourselves if we wish to see it used to sustain--or perhaps even grow--the nature of discourse.

To that end, I thank you, Mr. Ebert, for whiling away your work day by frequently submitting such thought-provocative notions in your blogs. I may not always agree with the position you take, or the reasoning that lead you there, but I have yet to walk away without having paused to genuinely consider the subject at hand.

This is really sad I know but I couldn't even wait till I got to the end of this blog to post this and all I really wanted to say was that your blogs are so long compared to the byte sized snacks we surfers are used to that, even though I love them so, I have to exert iron discipline to read them through to the end and not just skip trying to sense when where the best bits are.

Gimme gimme gimme! More stimulation!

Ok - now that I've had a break, I'll go back and read the rest of your blog now.

Ebert: You mean the phrenological charts didn't liven things up?

And then there are conversations such as this one: thoughtful and thought provoking, yet calming by its focused lens on a particular topic. I think that's one of the main pleasures of reading your blogs: they absorb your attention for a definite span of time. Love the tweets, love the links. Love, in fact, being connected with "Roger" throughout the day. My Pal. And through "Roger," this personality localized in his thoughts, I am connected to everyone he's connected to. Variety is good. So is focused attention.

Dear Mr. Ebert,

I am newcomer to twitter and finding my way. Also I have only just started following you, don't live in the US so I have never read any of your reviews until now. First all, can i just say I am enjoying your reviews very much and all your tweets and retweets. Fascinating subject, how new media affect our lives, The BBC has made a great documentary about this, the title: The virtual revolution. Interviews with a great variety of interesting people that are directly or indirectly part of the industry. Link http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

Ebert: I took the test and they say I am a Web Leopard. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Look forward to reading more reviews and tweets,
Best wishes,
Alwina

Is that ... why episodic television is losing to reality shows?

Roger, I don't know how much TV you watch--if the answer is "very little", that is entirely understandable, given your voracious diet of films.

But as a young film lover who has for a long time been working on seeing the "canon" of great movies, lately I've been focusing a lot more on TV--and finding a lot to watch. We're in a golden age of television.

While the main networks have, true, been taken over by reality programming, cable networks (and HBO and other pay channels) have been quietly producing marvelous long-form film work in the form of television shows.

Shows like "The Wire," "Dexter", "Mad Men", and "The Sopranos", just to name a very few, are often viewed a season at a time (in 13-hour chunks), and have the depth, pacing, and appeal of a great novel. They're not about frisson, but instead reward patience and contemplation in order to reach for powerful effects.

I doubt you have the time for such things, and perhaps it would be better for me to watch, say, 6 or 7 great classic movies than one season of television; but still, I encourage you not to disparage a medium which is truly delivering many enduring masterpieces as merely a wasteland smothered in reality TV.

Ebert: Oh, I love TV. But I realized a while ago that my vocation is to watch movies. That's a professional priority. Pauline Kael told me years ago, before cable, that some of the best new movies were...made for TV.

There's a pile of half-read books glaring at me with disapproval from next to my bed!

I have been following your journal for the last 15 months. I loved the one about your father, and this one also accords very much with my own feelings. On a different tack of interesting books, you could try Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos- I'm only at ch 0, but I really love it and understand it. Brigid

An intriguing read. I have to admit, being somewhat of a computer and web addict since around 1995 and pretty much a lifetime gamer I think my brain has been irrevocably rewired. I too very rarely read anymore (with the exception of film theory or other non-fiction books) and often find myself spending countless hours not doing anything in particular, rather just link-hopping around the web searching for frissons.

Aside from the differences in the way we socialize nowadays and the move toward more and more virtual living, does it have any real and serious effect though?

Hey Roger, I saw that video a while ago and felt the same way. You may want to correct your description, though I confess I thought the same thing. Read this article about Ronnie and watch the other videos and you will discover that Ronnie is not the "woman" you think. The head scarf causes the problem. Perhaps Ronnie will record his next video with a cap instead.

I liked your intensity and depth of thinking. I am amazed that you are a movie critic but here you appeared like a behavioral scientist. You have noticed your behavior so meticulously and observed your actions; that could be done only by someone who is stable from within.
Today everything has become so shallow, shallow thinking,shallow behavior, shallow relationships. Thanks to pace of today and pace full breaking news that we all have short term memories due to synapses not running longer and denser. Provided with so much information but no time to channel it will lead to shallow and average thinking people. In your article the view I hold about today's knowledge hungry world is reflected. With so much on-surface approach everything will be soon evaporated leaving nothing behind.
That is why in society we see more of adverse behaviors that are result of shallowness, lack of thinking and lack of visualization of the self-image. People are becoming more and more dissatisfied as they spent much time without and not within.
I liked how lightly you put this statement I hope people after reading this will become more serious and responsible.

"Deeper waters are cool and beautiful
and deep oceans only holds the pearls
real knowledge is deep inside
what dances outsides is wink of time"

regards

Sorry, I forgot to include the link to the article about Ronnie.

http://blog.mtviggy.com/2010/04/06/hear-what-may-be-the-worlds-best-guitar-player-botswanas-ronnie/

Lots of good videos, too.

Ebert: Why doesn't Ronnie have a record contract?

You've described my mental state perfectly. I probably read more now than I ever have, but it is half an article here, a blog post there - I've probably read three or four actual books over the past year.

I was inspired by your Dickens dilemma to pick up a mostly-finished book I've had on my nightstand since December - "Theodore Roosevelt's Letters To His Children". After reading three pages, I found this in a letter to Kermit:

"I quite agree with you about Tom Pinch. He is a despicable kind of character; just the kind of character Dickens liked, because he had himself a thick streak of maudlin sentimentality of the kind that, as somebody phrased it, 'made him wallow naked in the pathetic.' It always interests me about Dickens to think how much first-class work he did and how almost all of it was mixd up with every kind of cheap, second-rate matter. I am very fond of him. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply skip the bush and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens was that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman in any sense."

http://tinyurl.com/2btwmxo , pp.218-219

Thought you'd find it interesting.

Yours,

John

Ebert: To think that we had a president who would write like that!

Mr. Ebert, be thankful you can sit in between twits and churn out brilliant articles like this one, your influence on the English language interwebs is high and bright. Most people don't have that luck, their productivity all but siphoned out. Addiction to information (always questing for that next hit, however slight) can be nasty, and I would wager many brilliant minds are falling to its lures on the internet. Online video games provide much of this as well, since in most popular games exhaustive knowledge of the system/items/maps will give the player a marked advantage.

Thomas de Quincey always reminds me of Baudelaire and my years in college; today, I'll blame your article, it's a bittersweet memory. I feel the same way you do towards reading and good books (abandoned companions!), and, while the shame remains, I've fully surrendered to the frisson machine that is the internet, half hoping this rewiring will lead somewhere, half wondering if it's irreversible.

I, too, had a harsh awakening upon reading the Carr article. The time I have spent on my computer has increased over the last few years. It's only been in the last few months that I've noticed what I've come to refer to as "the brain stuff," what feels like the inability to focus on things that don't hold an immediate interest. I'd mentioned it to a few friends prior to reading the article, and after reading it, I immediately posted a link to it on Facebook. Sad, but true.

I had made it more than 42 years without a video game system, but my mom bought one for me so I could use the Wii Fit. I had -- and truth be told, have -- resisted, not so much because I didn't want to try out the exercise portion, but because I didn't want to get hooked on one more thing that would be a time suck. And I'm not suggesting the Fit portion would be a waste of time; it's the peripheral games that I suspect would get me hooked.

My immediate reaction to the article was similar to yours: I read a book. It was the second in the Stieg Larsson trilogy, so it probably didn't require as much thinking as the Dickens, but I enjoyed it in SUCH a different way than what I read online (or, truth be told, than the many books I listen to via audiobook, where I multitask through so much that sections of classic books will forever be associated in my mind with emptying cat pans or scrubbing my kitchen floor, which just isn't RIGHT).

The thing on which I will cogitate most from this post is the effect of this rewiring on our country's political discourse. This search for frisson really does appear to explain the ever-expanding need for a new and better sound byte. And it terrifies me for our future.

I would make a pledge to forever change my online habits, but I fear the pledge would go the way of so many New Year's resolutions. Instead, I will read a book and take a walk today. I will physically (as opposed to online chatting) talk with friends about those things that have given me moments of frisson. And I will go mow my lawn.

Huzzah to you for another great post -
MJ

In general, pacing in video games can often be successfully detached from engagement, which is to say you don't necessarily have to throw a million things at the screen all at once in order to hold someone's attention. For example, a Ukrainian studio recently produced a game called STALKER, which involves drudging through a sort of extra-freaky version of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It's moody, slow, and punishing, doing very little to demand the player's attention, but there is a sort of robustness to its environments that compels certain gamers to hang around.

Context is important with games as with movies. Your attention span in a cinema, with a darkened room and a big screen and few distractions, is much greater than your attention span in front of your TV in a house with hundreds of distractions (or on the internet with millions). Similarly, a game like STALKER works when you're sitting up close to the screen in a darkened room with your headphones on. If you're on the couch in your living room you probably aren't actually immersed in the space, and in that case the game has to compete for your attention by ratcheting the pace way up and creating super intense feedback loops between you and the system so that you can't afford to look away. (Sadly this is a far more prevalent style, and by far the more popular cultural conception of what a video game is. I think it may also be the more popular form of film these days.)

It may be possible that games (and virtual worlds in general) are capable of alleviating this dividing of attention to an extent that films and novels cannot. When you are reasoning and acting in a virtual space, rather than just receiving information about it, you can achieve a tremendous singularity of focus and transfer a bit more of your consciousness directly from where you're sitting to whatever radioactive hellhole you're crawling around in. Twitter isn't really a concern when you're playing STALKER because they don't have Twitter in the Zone.

You're definitely onto something with this post, Roger. However, I think the bigger question is how we can undo this trend. My guess is, spend less time following the siren call of the 'net and more time reading books, through some sort of "triumph of the will".

Perhaps this could be the subject of a followup post.

Frisse is also a French word, and it applies to me more than frissons most of the time. It's sort of the same principle, and a little like a Cobb salad. You hit a piece of bacon and the dish has ramped up a bit.

Perhaps because I am a product of the 50s, television created an early necessity to multi-task. It was impossible for me to do homework other than in front of the TV set. No one complained because I made A's. The habit worked all the way through graduate school. Now, I forget to turn TV on because I've got three monitors on my desk, which are left to right: word processing, web pages for research or Netflix, social media. I am convinced that I rewire about once a year since my habits seem to change about that often. Last year, I preferred constant noise when working. This year, not so much, but it will change I have no doubt.

Almost everything in life now has a pause button, and I believe that's what rewires us most. Nothing has to be finished immediately.
Even if you half-cook something to eat and turn it off, it can be finished in the microwave later. It's the same with bookmarks, dog eared pages in books and DVR. Maybe pausing is the thing that allows us to go off in search of frisson or bacon bits.

Last night, I put things on pause for a while because a Twitter friend in the U.K. went to the emergency room with what turned out to be Bell's palsey. He's a young internet marketing guy, who tweeted the entire time. By the time he left ER, he was already plotting a cool eye patch to buy which he'd been researching between tweets. Maybe the ability to multi-task kept him from panic and fear.

Perhaps, the man at UCLA is correct about our shortened attention spans, but maybe we just didn't need to spend as much time on things to begin with!

I am glad to see you have Thomas de Quincey next up in your reading queue, because he has been on my mind too recently. Have you ever read his essay "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" from his volume SUSPIRIA IN PROFUNDIS? I'm fond of it because it served as the loose inspiration for Dario Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, beginning with SUSPIRIA from 1977 with Jessica Harper, Alida Valli, and Joan Bennett. I just wrote an appreciation for the film at my blog. I once asked you years ago at a luncheon before your Scorsese interview at OSU if you had seen or reviewed SUSPIRIA, and I don't recall whether you said yes or no. 20th Century Fox released it through a shadow company with little fanfare, so it's possible you missed it, or perhaps wrote it off as a potential "Dog of the Week" and skipped it. You wrote a very funny pan of a preceding film of his, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, where you mistakenly referred to him as Salvatore Argento (his late father and the producer of the film - I don't know if the webmaster could fix that so that future name searches will hit it properly). If you have not seen it, I suppose it will be another of those films you will see when they invent the eight-day week.
In any case, I am feeling the frisson of you and myself independently contemplating DeQuincey at roughly the same time.

Ebert: At this point I've posted 40 or so comments, and I think DeQuincey has been mentioned in four of them. Some remarkable people tun up here,

I understand your attraction to the all-day finger food diet that is Twitter, but I understand your concern about it all the more.

The headmaster of our children's school introduced us to current education theory recently. Apparently, what we the middle-aged regard as learning - book learning - peaked in 1965. This is the approach that says "here are the facts, learn them". Now, educational strategy is relativist. Children are taught to edit the blizzard of information that reaches them, interrogate the sources and decide for themselves what is true and what is false. Given the snowdrifts of horseshit we wade through every day, I suspect this is a sensible idea, but it bodes ill for Trollope.

The Internet has changed ALL of our lives irrevocably either through direct use or through fallout from the use of friends and family. EVERYONE looks for those frisson moments, but most especially and urgently, the young. I fear for how this will impact their development for critical, profound thinking as well as their ability to 'sit' with an issue, to research it, investigate it, debate and ponder it. I'm the mother of an 11 year ok'd and I like Twitter, YouTube, you name it. But we all need quiet and a mental respite that only comes from disconnecting ourselves from the Internet. Good for you for going to the non WiFi room!!

The truth in this article actually scares me. Less and less am I able to watch TV and leave it in a single channel (the fact that there's something actually good or not in it, is absloutely irrelevant). Wasn't it great years and years ago when there were only 5-6 channels and you actually had to get up and change them? Back then you actually got to enjoy programs.
Have you tried to watch a movie in youtube (usually split in 10-20, 10 minute portions)?. It's like a nightmare, your mind does end up getting the message in it (more or less) but you can't stop yourself from checking your e-mail every 2 minutes.
I actually wish I could cure my mind from this.

Good Morning, Roger.

Definitely need to read in the room without wifi. Dickens is so visual. Twenty-five years ago as I was completing a bachelor degree with certification to teach junior high and high school English, I remember thinking Dickens would have been the king of the television mini-series if he had the technology available. It was the mini heyday.

I read some of DeQuincey's wonderful Confessions as an assignment. A peek into daily life of a working family.

I suspect twitter is highly addictive, like opium.

As the surface reality gets noisier, all the more reason to look within for stability and value. Reading is great, at least until the Kindle learns how to tweet.

Roger,
Thanks for this! Its so refreshing to hear that I'm not alone in my thinking. Unfortunately, I too have recognized these traits in myself... no matter how hard I try to fight them. Society must be having a larger impact on my sensibilities than even I imagined/feared.

I'm ashamed to admit that I find or get referred to an article on a very interesting topic and notice that its 4 or 5 pages and decide NOT to read it. Even worse, someone sends me a video thats 3min long (3min!!) and I contemplate whether or not my time is too valuable to devote to such trivialities for that length of time. Yeesh!

Well, your journal entry is the kick in the pants that I've needed to rewire my brain back to the way it functioned before the internet, twitter, et al! Now, to finally break open McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and spend Sunday with my ol' friend, Cormac.

Cheers!!
Chris Ortman

The problem with the internet now is that everybody is panicking over it in Australia where it is a no-big-deal in America.

At least you have Obama, in Australia both main parties are conservative even though one is called The Liberal Party. I don't think the internet has lessened our attention spans, it just makes us more tired because we want to sit at a desk and find out what's going on in the world.

In Australia our government wants to censor the internet even though the people doesn't want that to happen. If it does happen here, the internet will be a much sadder and more isolated place.

I use the internet for research as well as fun - there's a lot to be found on the internet but at the same time I think too much of it makes me depressed - much like too much TV makes you depressed. News these days makes me depressed - this morning's Sunday paper made me think the plastic wrap the newspaper was delivered in is a protective shield to stop us being bombarded with the bad news all at once.

Dear Roger;

I signed on to twitter just to see what you were up to. I must say that after a day or two I became concerned with the amount of time you were seemingly devoting to it.

I checked out some others but in the end I have given up on it. I still would rather call or email my friends and family than broadcast to the world my unconsidered thoughts.

There is little question in my mind that we are being re-wired. I'm sure it started with radio. Galloped ahead with TV. Racing now with the computer. Perhaps our only salvation will come when we hard wire the things to our skulls.

Ebert: Of course you have to take into account that I'm at home more than most people.

I say with a small bit of shame and a small bit of pride that I removed wifi from my house two years ago and I'm happy with it. I like having rooms with no internet, where I can hole up for deep reading and deep writing, or music listening.

I love the Internet for the global community it fosters and for the ability to get work done anywhere, but following the news on the Internet has made me paranoid and depressed. I don't do it any more.

Roger, re: "....the possibility that my brain--and yours too, since you are here--has been rewired by the Internet. ....a UCLA professor who used an MRI scan to observe the brain activity of six volunteers. Three were web veterans, three were not. He found that veteran Web users had developed "distinctive neural pathways."

Roger, this is very important what i am going to tell you. What follows is fiction but it is based on a huge hunch i have that what we do on these screens is not reading per se, but a new kind of human mode of reading, it is different from reading on paper surfaces, as I am sure you will agree, but it is different in terms of brain wiring too, and nobody is looking into this. it's all gadgethead geek stuff, more gadgets, bottom line. Push the stuff on us. we get our fixes. But I theorize that reading on screens lights up different parts of our brains compared to when we read on paper, and those parts for screen reading, marvin Minsky at MIT calls it "screen-reading" and i call it just "screening" and Kevin Kelly at Wired agrees with me, as does Paul Saffo the futurist, but very few others, i believe that reading on paper is superior, superior for reading retention, analysis, processing and critical thinking skills and that future MRI scans will show I am right. What then, Roger, what then?

Here's my take for now: reader beware!

''MRI brain imaging lab studies differences in screen, paper reading''
Inside Boston Staff
By Danny Bloom

Ellen Marker studies reading. But not off screens or in paper books.
Her research is done in a Quincy laboratory.

The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.
Like me, Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.

But first, let's see what the scans will be like.

Dr Marker asks me to put myself into an fMRI machine so she and his
team can study which areas of the brain are activated by reading text
on paper compared to reading the same text on a computer screen or a
Kindle e-reader.

And this is why I’m here. Today I will donate my brain scans to science.

Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.

"Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution," Marker, 43, says. "We need both."

On the day I climb into the brain imaging cocoon, I am thinking about
what it all might mean.
But since I am just a guinea pig and not a scientist, I will have to
wait for the results.

I enter a sterile lab, and Marker and her four associates greet me,
all in white lab coats.
As they hand me my a pale blue gown to change into, I have
second thoughts — “How can I read while lying down horizontally my
back, not my preferred reading mode?” — but decide to push myself.

Science needs me!

The scientists load me into the machine and I'm off.

Next step: They strap my head down, because any movement distorts the
brain imaging. Ever try to read a book without facial movements?

I feel as if I’m being shoved into the middle of a toilet paper roll,
the walls so close my eyelashes almost graze them.

Then I hear a voice through the earphones I’m wearing. It’s Dr Marker.

“You okay in there?” she asks.

Graduate student Dan Smith, 52, tells me to relax before
running around to join the other scientists in the control room.

With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.

“The more we understand how the brain works,” she says, “the more we
will be able to help people modulate its activity.”

As the machine switches on, it sounds like a jackhammer. I follow
Marker's instructions and as I do, the group watches my brain on
their computer monitors. I willl read passages from a novel, and then
later I will read
the same passages on a Kindle. I just hope the Kindle does not blow up
inside the brain scan machine!

Research and teaching take up most of Marker's time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.

During my first hour in the fMRI machine, researchers map my brain's
reading paths
to find out which parts correlate to
which regions of the brain.

“You have 10 minutes,” Marker says through my earphones near the end
of our test. “Keep reading."

On the
other side of the glass pane, the scientists can see my brain lighting
up as I read on paper and as I read on a screen. Regions light up in
different ways, Marker says.

Komisaruk discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”

Marker's lab has paid me a
$100 subject fee, so I want to give them their money’s worth.

After all, it’s not easy to get funding for this stuff — Marker
says she spends at least half of her time applying for grants.

“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”

When the tests are over, Market tells me the data takes two hours to
convert, but it can take much longer to
make sense of it.

“We’ll be at this for a while,” she says.

One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills?

Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”

I see that at the heart of all her research, there is a
philosopher trying not only to understand reading, but also figure out
the nuts and bolts that make up the human experience.

“It’s the hard question I want to answer,” she says. “What creates
consciousness?

“I find that,” she adds, “and I find the Nobel Prize.”

Dear Roger, Thank you for pointing out and admitting to what I fear is the real pandemic in our modern world, our need for constant entertainment as a way of distracting us from the realities of life. Art and philosophy, traditionally the things which have helped humanity better understand our place in the scheme of things, requires a calming and an opening of the mind that now seems impossible amid the constant 24/7 buzz of media info and most of what's out there is selling something and serving a short term gain/goal. My husband and I are music teachers and we've been stunned by the changes we've witnessed in the way our students study. We are in our 40's, playing and practicing music for 30+ years each, having devoted most of our youth to rehearsing when we had 2 TV channels, no internet, no DVDs, no video games, restricted phone time and, most importantly, no greater thrill than the world of music slowly, subtly opening up before us as we began, via at least 10,000 hours of immersion, to understand how playing and writing music could allow us a vehicle for self-expression, catharsis and provide us with a way of making our way in this world. Our students, by and large, have a tough time finding 30 undisturbed minutes in a day to set aside for practice and find themselves discouraged when they can't sing as well as some pop tart's recording (which in most cases, has been 'fixed in the mix', a photoshop equivalent for audio recordings. Also, the goal now is celebrity and scene making, becoming privileged and wealthy via fame or notoriety and the desire to learn the craft is hideously subverted by this superficial chase. As a vocal coach I am concerned that I am allowing my students to fail by not asking more of them but by pushing for dedication, I sometimes lose them altogether. It seems to me that we have created a world where 'instant gratification takes too long' as Carrie Fisher once famously wrote. I will continue to try to lead by example (we have no TV in our house) but we too have been sucked into the internet age and now feel that our business would suffer were we to remain the luddites we apparently are! Pandora's box has been flung open and the lid has vanished. We'll continue to fight the good fight but it's discouraging, to say the least. Thanks for the chance to vent a little Roger. I admire you tremendously and wish you and your lovely wife every happiness. I am also an avid reader, a dog walker and a birdwatcher so I've built in a few practices that I hope will keep my wiring from further degradation :) Big love to you!

Ebert: We need dogs now more than ever.

I don't worry too much about the brain being rewired. It is a flexible beast, so if it can be rewired into one direction, it can also go back. I worry more about the threshold I feel like having to jump whenever I want to go back. I have been under the influence of the internet basically before it was the internet, so I definitely notice the effects you describe. I worry that I don't think about the problems I try to solve as a scientist as deeply as I could.
I normally don't watch movies, because the time investment seems so huge. But whenever I finish a movie I think that I will definitely watch movies more often, then I don't.
But I read lots of books. Some years ago I started to read more again and even (almost) managed my goal of one book per week. I'm below that number now but still, lots of books.
I also think that creating your own fissons by jumping over the mental threshold and shortly committing to something is well worth it. When I read a physics paper, understand it good enough to explain the key points and blog about it, that's gratifying.

I am thankful for these technologies that allow us to all still enjoy your voice and insight. Lovely essay and I so enjoyed the video. Happy weekend.

Hey Roger, a frisson is cool, but it doesn't beat the feeling of elevation when you watch an awesome scene in a film. The kind where you get goosebumps and you feel overwhelmed. Is elevation related to the frisson?
Anyhow, reading your Cannes postmortem entry,and now this, I gather you're not too optimistic about the future of true art, and of humanity in general for that matter. How much time do you think we have left? I'm thinking I should get out there fast before it's too late.

You seem so worried about how your brain is rewiring itself, Roger, but why? Just because something is different doesn't automatically make it better or worse; usually it's just different. The human brain adjusts to the stimuli it is given; it really is as simple as that. Just be thankful that you are (more or less) in the position to choose how your brain is stimulated.

I'm reminded of the books by Jared Diamond. He spent some time with the native peoples of Papua New Guinea, and observed that they are just as intelligent as any strangers he might happen to meet on a street corner in a modern city. They just live in a world which lacks what we think of as normal, everyday products of our technology. But they apply their intelligence to surviving the world they do live in, and Diamond admits that he could not have survived in that world without their assistance. It was totally foreign to him, and he was as helpless as an infant, while their brains were fine-tuned for it: finding food, building shelter from scratch, and remembering absolutely everything since they don't have any way of writing things down.

Your brain has changed since ten years ago, because you are putting it to uses which didn't exist at the time. Same for the ten years before that. But you can, if you so choose, still read a novel of hundreds of pages and follow it. You may feel like you don't do this as often as you used to, but as you already know, your brain has not forgetten how.

Sadly, at the same time the speech centers of your brain are dying from atrophy. Perhaps you knew this already too. Surgeons could perform a miracle procedure tomorrow to finally restore your lower jaw and vocal chords, but then you would only be looking at months of therapy to help your brain relearn how to use your facial muscles to form syllables. You wouldn't be starting from scratch like a toddler, but you wouldn't sound like yourself right away, either. For what it's worth, you're still better off as you are than stroke victims who lose entire lobes of the brain at once, and never get those functions back.

While it's unfortunate that you were forced into this position, I must say I'm glad that you've turned to using the internet the way you do. It lets the rest of us take a peek inside your head, and it is a very, very interesting place.

I've noticed that shallow, distracted feeling when I read online. My solution was to buy one of those e-ink readers. (Not an iPad. The whole point is that it doesn't have an internet connection.) Any online article or essay longer than a page gets transferred to the e-reader.

I usually use the reader with an online service called Instapaper which allows you to save articles online with a Javascript bookmarklet and download them in ebook format. It's also possible just to save articles as text files, which is handy because my Sony Reader doesn't do well with pages that use tables for formatting. (I can't believe there are still websites out there that format their pages with tables.)

Reading articles and essays on the e-reader is a totally different experience, more like reading a print book than an internet browser. I can see the links but they don't snag my attention (as described in the Wired article) because they don't lead anywhere. I'm less likely to skim and I seem to retain more of what I read.

I shared the link in your first tweet with my high school students who agreed that they surf more and read less, except if the reading is something they "like," by which they really mean "engage with."

So the future of education (my takeaway from Wired article) is not necessarily horribly bleak, the internet hasn't necessarily killed critical thinking in favor of easy, shallow thinking. Rather academic reading needs to include more true engagement, more internal "linking" in the student reader, and the comprehension and re-rewiring of brains will follow.

Thanks for a provocative post and forum for thoughtful commentary!

The 'average American' read a total of 1-2 books per year pre-Internet/video games, Roger. Only a tiny percentage of movie-goers ever chose Art House over AMC, or poetry over comic books, or Chopin over the Brittany of the moment.

The rewiring of our brains began way before 1980, Roger. The only difference now is that it's gone from pandemic to epidemic...

I also have an addictive personality, Roger. I've been addicted to novels, comics, video games, films, sex, and twitter. My addiction often changes. In the end, the only constant addiction for me is films. I regret some of my addictions, such as sex and twitter. I used to tweet a lot. Most of them are pointless tweets. Tweeting became faster than thinking. I even once fought with my ex over Twitter. Can you imagine how dumb is that? I'm glad those days are over. I closed my old account and started a new one with wiser mindset.

Now, I have a new addiction. I'm addicted to blogging. I feel some kind of a need to keep on watching films and write the reviews. I'm worried because blogging is starting to distract me from my study. I also feel that I'm no longer let films to linger in my mind for a while before writing the reviews. That is why I'm glad that I will be having mid-term exam because I can detached myself from blogging for at least a week.

I'm aware of all the negative changes caused by web-surfing. I usually gave myself some free time from the internet. For example, I went to my college without bringing my laptop and wouldn't use any computer in my college. That way, I could free my self from internet for about 10 hours.

Here is my suggestion for you, Roger. Why don't you start to write another script or another book? Maybe you will find yourself addicted to that kind of work again. Wouldn't it be fun to write another script? :)

P.S. : I just started to make a new blog written in English. Maybe, you could check my first post. I don't guarantee any frisson though. :D

Beautiful post. In addition to its benefits (like being able to read this piece, for example), every new technology exacts a toll — yet it's surprisingly difficult to pin down the cost in such concrete & personal terms. Really happy to read something like this.

I've been unnerved by my year-long habit of waking up and diving straight into a screen when I first open my eyes (because my iPhone sits on the nightstand, for some reason.) I recently made it a rule to shower, get dressed, and go out for coffee before opening the internets. Still stunned by how much discipline this takes. My impatience to immediately check the latest news, feeds, and chatter is mind-bending. And yet someday in the near future I'll probably pay Apple or whomever a fair amount of money to inject a wi-fi chip into my head.

I wonder if the recent pushback against Facebook has more to do with a cultural gut-check about online habits than any concerns about privacy...

this describes me to a tee. Due to my disability, i need someone to turn pages for me. in recent years , as my grandparents get older

Ebert: Would iPad or Kindle be of any use, adapted in some way to your disability? Audiobooks? I feel for you. Stay in touch.

I've always seen technology as a double edged sword. On one hand it can make our lives easier and longer as well as expose us to different people and ways of life and help us keep in contact with friends we should have forgotten about long ago.

The opposite end of the spectrum is that technology can overtake ones life and make them a sort of unthinking slave to pop culture.

One of my favorite things Kurt Vonnegut ever said was that he wanted to go and mail a letter, and have a damn good time doing so.

Roger, this blog post hit home for me, because I am in the process of (unintentionally) re-wiring my own brain. I'm on the computer all day at work; when I leave work I look at email, Twitter, TPM, etc. on my iPhone; and when I get home I try to read books, newspapers or magazines, but always feel a psychic tug from my electronic and digital devices.

This is what I mean, I think, when I tell people that the iPhone changed my life. Not in a spiritual way, I tell them, but in the way it immediately inserted itself deeply in my daily routine. (And changing a 50-year-old's daily routine is no trifling matter!) I love the damn thing but it scares me a little to think how it has changed me. And frankly I am not sure how I feel about all of these changes.

This is very disturbing. I hope along with you that deliberating through the classics and trying to keep yourself from distraction will help to get your brain back to how it was. Because it's really scary to have changed the landscape of your mind.

It's like the comparison of watching "Iron Man 2" and something like a Weerasethakul film. The former is easy to access, and thus perhaps more enjoyable. The latter is probably the better film, but you have to work at it and it can drain you. As you said, the internet has made it so it can be a chore to experience great "slow cinema" and champion the blockbusters. This is a world where to many "Robin Hood" is better than "Tokyo Story" because the latter is "boring"!

I'm pretty sure it's all feeding into the same machine. The internet is wearing you down so that the blockbusters will be the only films accessible. Do you think this could help lead to the demise of Cannes?

Frissons are drugs, plain and simple.

Ebert: Perhaps because I see six to ten a week, I fully retain my ability to absorb movies. Sometimes I literally flee to Ozu for a little emotion reflected in tranquility.

Roger, Ronnie is a man. I didn't pay attention at first, but after the comment above saying it's a man, and you said no a woman, look at the man's chest, and you can see plainly there are no female breasts in view at all. It IS a man. Interesting how our eyes deceive us! I am sure it is a man now.

Ebert: I didn't associate the head scarf and the smile with a man. But the fingers seem like a man's.

Hi Roger

because I am a very good Tweeter. I took to it naturally; it entertains me.

You are a great Tweeter! And a prolific one.

You are a frisson creator as much or more than a frisson experiencer. A content creator, not just a content consumer. For that reason, you should avoid video games, which are only passive consumer experiences.

I can relate. I have stacks of books waiting to be read - and 603 tweets. Ouch.

I worry about my kids and how their brains are now wired from video games. They live in a world where the worst thing they can possibly imagine is "I'm bored".

I hear what you're saying, and believe me you're not alone. I've been thinking the same thing for years now. At my best, I used to read about 100 pages an hour in a frenzy of delight. I loved books, loved to read. Even today, walking through a library gives me a measure of peace that nothing else in the world can. I started reading serious books when I was thirteen in 1986, later than most and it was an almost painful process, but I loved it.

A few years later, in 1990, I began to try my hand at writing. Like reading, I started off slow. Neither talent had come naturally to me, I had to work at it. Computers helped quite a bit, since they allowed more inexpensive trial and error than a typewriter and paper would have.

By 1994 I was an able hand at both. Not the best, not the worst, just pretty damn good and I was proud of that.

Then, not long after, I found the internet. You were there too at the beginning so I don't need to explain how great it was. Hundreds and thousands of intelligent and informative pages on every subject. Everything free. I was almost like a communion of minds between interesting people. It's what attracted you and I to it. In fact, that's what attracted everyone else to it too.

Yet, around 2004 my attention span began to wane. I couldn't read as well as I could. Books seemed too... slow. By the time I got to the end of the page, I had all but forgotten what I had read at the beginning of it. Reading became as hard for me as it was when I first started, only this time I just didn't feel like doing it anymore. The interest wasn't there. What used to be a great love of words had become a chore.

It felt like I had ADD, I just couldn't keep everything straight in my head when doing something as complex as writing or reading a book. I've managed to shake the worst of it off by simply not going online anymore. Wasn't much of a sacrifice, since the internet today is a wholly different beast than it once was. Apart from Amazon, eBay, Film Threat, iMDB, Autoblog, The Superficial, The Onion, CNN and of course here, I rarely ever go anywhere else.

Which is why I don't completely agree with the findings you posted. Don't get me wrong, I completly agree that this incessant surfing the web is frying people's brains, but I don't think it's the internet itself that's screwing up people's minds. No more than rock music corrupted youth when you were a kid. It's just that every new media seems to go through a backwards aging phase. Where it starts off as somewhat mature and wise then works it's way down to adult, immature, adolescent, juvenile and infantile. Look at popular music, look at popular movies, look at popular books. We went from "Down in the Willow Garden" to "Bad Romance". We went from "Metropolis" to "Alice in Wonderland". We went from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Twilight".

When the internet started it may not have been Salinger, but it wasn't the haven for complete and utter dumbassery that it is today. I think a lot of people have become so used to it so they don't notice anymore, but just look around a bit and holy jumping jesus...

I think the problem is that the internet both appeals to, and immerses, people in a sea of smallminded stupidity and like it or not this is going to rub off.

My advice? Do like Roger does and spend at least an hour a day reading a book. Or do like me and just shut the damn thing completely off for most of the day. Then, when you do come on, be selective. Choose things that are 75% intellectual, 20% fun and 5% amusingly dumb, and don't bother with anything else.

Life is too damn short to waste.

I must admit to being culpable of surfing during breakfast. In fact, I am taking a break from my pancakes and bacon to type this comment. I would like to think that my morning internet time resembles the time I spent when I took the paper, but it doesn't. Sure, I read over the New York Times and check out a few RSS feeds - but I also visit Twitter and Facebook. Heavy reading was reduced, a few years, to reading in bed.

Over time, I also noticed that the time I spent online often felt vacuous. I caught myself surfing while watching television and films, while eating, while talking on the phone. Nothing stuck. I resolved just a few months ago that I would henceforth cease multi-tasking: no internet while doing other things! Since then, movies have gotten better. My conversational skills have improved. I've started to crochet again.

And reading? As far as reading goes, my pleasure in single-tasking has grown so much that the novel I was reading in bed has made its way downstairs. Pretty soon, I'll finish up Stendhal. He's inspired me next to read that copy of "Corinne" that has been on my shelf since college. I'm not regretting reduced time online much at all. And the frisson? It is even more delicious in its newfound rarity.

Ebert: A cloud of ignorance which enveloped me regarding Stendhal for many years. Why didn't anyone tell me how entertaining he is? One day I started reading The Red and the Black and simply could...not...stop.

I miss those lazy summer vacation days back when I was little, when I could read four or five books in one sitting. It's quite depressing when you realize your 10 year old self had a longer attention span than your current self.

I think once you become aware of this internet ADD problem though, you can sort of re-rewire your brain to be able to focus on longer things again. I also try to read a bit every day, though some days are less successful. My weakness isn't Twitter, but TV on the internet. Before you know it, episodes will have gone by, and you realize what you watched wasn't even that good.

The real problem is when people don't care that they can't or don't read books. However, I just read on a blog that there are more US public library branches than McDonalds...so maybe there still is some hope!

I think the ultimate irony here is that we would not see such interesting and thoughtful articles out of Roger were it not for the internet.

My opinion is this - the internet is not REPLACING classical, comprehensive education. It provides an outlet (as it does for Roger) and repository of information accessible to people who otherwise would have access to NOTHING.

"Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain"

I don't think this statement appreciates the fact that more people than ever before are thinkging AT ALL. People who are going to Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge are not going to come out with shorter attention spans or higher attractions to superficiality than their peers did a few decades ago. But the people who would never have had access to that kind of community, one built on the sharing of knowledge and ideas through debate and inquiry, will find opportunity for that kind of self-improvement through the internet. I think in that respect, it is unquestionably a good thing. It is better to have superficial knowledge of something, than to have no knowledge of it at all.

Thank you for pulling together a lot of threads of thought and feeling that we have in common. My mind loves to make lateral, unexpected connections. It's very useful to me as an artist, but the internet is like a vortex to a mind like mine.

I spend altogether too much time online, which agitates my mind so I couldn't dream of settling down to a book, unless I practice a session of mindfulness meditation - it is the only antidote I have found, and sometimes I have to perform it twice in succession (eg 30 mins then another 15 mins) to get settled down.

While all this mental activity allows me to make connections I might not have, I pay a price in reducing the quality of thought by severely reducing my time to reflect and process all the inputs. I also pay a productivity price.

Like you, I recognize the addictiveness of the behaviour and must learn to build a structure of constraints so I don't waste my life in the inter-ether.

I used to wonder how we ever got along without the internet, and much as I love it, now I wonder how to resist its siren call.

Roger Ebert, you deserve more "attaboys" than anybody I've yet met. Here is but one reward after having resisted the whole thing for so long, starting with electronic musical instruments -- which still take a hell of a lot longer to program even approximately than to just play the damn thing by hand.

I started tweetin' three weeks back and am proud to be among your lists.

Someone's remarked -- actually, @catvoncat -- that tweeting is great exercise for teaching yourself to write concise sentences. Seconded. She won't use shortcuts. Am iffy about that as a hard and fast rule, as language does develop to purposes. One reason we can't reade olde English (or even Shakespeare) is that over time we've seriously condensed our sentence structures.

Concentrating a feeling into as short a sentence as possible has always been A Top Challenge. It's why Great Writing is Great Writing. Like you, I generally prefer 19th C. writers for that, as verbose as they may appear to be not to an "internet altered brain," but to the lazy minded.

Awhile ago I got a manuscript I didn't recognize, except that they were the most beautiful, concentrated, colorful sentences I'd read in having gone over maybe 15,000 bits over the previous year.

A genius. A real one. Not a pop showbiz normaloid.

THEN I checked the author info provided (Always read "blind"). It was a new translation from the French of "From Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne from a highly skilled translator.

I just about wept.

As you'd know, I don't buy all this "brain" business. I think it's Calvinism translated into inanimate scientific gizmoes. The brain doesn't do anything but follow its owner's orders and willed habits.

So the hope I see in Twitter is as an exercise for people to get to their points ASAP, then use that habit for longer digressions. It's an intuitive thang.

Roger, I have a hunch about reading on paper vs reading on screens. I believe that future MRI scan tests will show that diff parts of our brains light up when we read on paper vs when we read on screens. Two things: if i am right, how will this impact all the screening we do? and two, if I am right, hunch-wise, do you maybe sort of need a new word for reading on screens, to differeniate it from reading on paper? I ran this by Kevi Kelly of Wired, he said go for it, yes. i suggested screening for screen-reading, he said go go go. Marvin Minsky at MIT suggested screen-reading until a better word comes down the highway. Any suggestions on yr part, Roger? Skimming, scanning, screading, what? It it not reading, that is for sure. A new human mode of reading. I am sure a new word will come to us and it might be "screening". I hate screening but i do it 24/7/365 now because my days are numbered and I want to get as much info as I can before I depart this mortal coil. Pokkuri me to the max!

You write an intellectual piece about how the internet has hobbled our minds, you get 36 comments.

You say video games aren't art, or you make one tweet about kids wearing flag t-shirts and you get thousands of comments... only reinforcing your point.

Making matters worse is the ad revenue model for internet sites. Many sites are now posting thousands of nonsensical blurbs about every bit of gossip to inflate page views. But on scads of these sites, I hardly see a single comment on the majority of pieces... suggesting that few people actually read beyond the headline. That's hardly a revelation, I know. But it's a disappointing trend that owes much to CNN's innovation of the 24-hour news cycle, the news ticker, etc. keeping people on constant information overload so we never have time to think critically, much less an inclination.

The good news is that some major outlets, including the NY Times, have found that ad revenue is on the decline. One contributing factor may be that advertisers are becoming wise to the chicanery of internet traffic statistics, and that a deeper read of site stats shows many gaping holes or leaps of logic.

While you have the benefit of already having a dedicated audience who wants to read the whole of what you write because they continue to find it interesting, most web journalism consists of people regurgitating sound bites and scoops from stories that were first published elsewhere by someone who actually beat the street to get the information. We're now reading Cliffs Notes of summaries of events in the real world! It won't be long before we ... wait... we're already reading tweets of Cliffs Notes of...

Oh hell.

Your article made me think about my curious Peace Corps experience in Bangladesh from 2004-2006. I never thought I spent too much time on the computer, but in reality I was always surfing, and watching a ton of movies and TV. My reading habits had slowly eroded since college. Then I went to a hot, noisy country where I had no TV and internet was nonexistent (unless I took a five hour bus ride to the capital).

The Peace Corps library in Dhaka had a wonderful selection, built up over the years by volunteers who brought books into the country and left them there for others. Deprived of media, I read at an astounding rate: I read Dostoevsky for the first time, both "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov". I read Lapierre & Collins' amazing history of the Indian partition, "Freedom at Midnight". I fell in love with the late, great David Foster Wallace and read "Infinite Jest" (including footnotes!) And my first Dashiell Hammett, "Red Harvest". And "Devil In The White City". And a history of the Mughal Empire. And "Guns Germs and Steel". I re-read "Grapes Of Wrath" and "East Of Eden", and for the first time "The Winter Of Our Discontent". I read my first Vonnegut, "Player Piano" and "Slaughterhouse Five". Oh, and "Life Of Pi". And on and on.

This was a rich season that I doubt will be repeated in my lifetime, even though I am now careful to set aside time to read. It was amazing how voracious I became once I was forcibly separated from media! I will always treasure those moments on the roof, reading in the shade as the late afternoon turned toward dusk, hearing the azan (Muslim call to prayer), watching the kids on the roof opposite playing and occasionally watching me to see if I did anything interesting, with smell of cooking fires all around, and the bats swooping after insects.

Though I don't read as often now, I do try to keep at it, and I am grateful for your recommendations: finished "Blood Meridian" recently, and it left me gobsmacked, as you might say.

Ebert: Yeah. When I was at the University of Cape Town, South Africa had no TV. I read pretty much all of the important English literature of Southern Africa, plus most of Orwell, Eliot, John O'Hara, Beckett, much of Shaw, a lot of Shakespeare and Marlowe, all of James Bond...

I notice in myself that I was feeling stiffled by 140 characters or less. It felt like if I couldn't fit it in that space then forget it, so I started forcing myself to blog at least once a week. I got a blog I had to pay for so that I would feel obligated to post to it just to make sure I don't limit my brain to thinking in 140 characters or less. We really are shortening our attention spans with the internet and I really want to get away from it more than I want to spend on it. It also bothers me that while people have their faces glued to their computers, it really allows so much corporate and political corruption because no one cares anymore unless it's some charity they can text four numbers to to donate ten dollars. We all need to wake up from this funk we are in.

Jeremy Knox:

It's just that every new media seems to go through a backwards aging phase. Where it starts off as somewhat mature and wise then works it's way down to adult, immature, adolescent, juvenile and infantile. Look at popular music, look at popular movies, look at popular books. We went from "Down in the Willow Garden" to "Bad Romance". We went from "Metropolis" to "Alice in Wonderland". We went from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Twilight".

I think this is an illusion, as much as anything. We recall only a fraction of the books published a hundred years ago--for the most part, the best fraction. Take a look at a bestseller list from 1910. Nothing in the top 10 is familiar! The Rosary and Simon the Jester were presumably the Twilights of their day.

But we remember all the books published today. We can't forget--we can see them. They're all around us, in the media and in bookstores. There are fewer old books in our consciousness, and it's a more selective group.

When it was younger the internet was selective for different reasons. There's more "complete and utter dumbassery" today because there's more internet. Fifteen years ago, the web was new. Not many people were on it, and in the days before Blogger and Facebook and Twitter having a space of your own on the web was harder. The people who went to the trouble of setting up websites were the ones who really thought they had something to say. Today the barriers to entry are lower--anyone can have a blog, and millions of people do. There are more websites in our consciousness, and it's a less selective group.

Time will filter the internet for us, too, eventually. Fifteen years from now no one will remember lolcats or rickrolling. We'll remember the best essays we read on the best websites and blogs.

Jeremy Knox: "It's just that every new media seems to go through a backwards aging phase. Where it starts off as somewhat mature and wise then works it's way down to adult, immature, adolescent, juvenile and infantile. Look at popular music, look at popular movies, look at popular books. We went from "Down in the Willow Garden" to "Bad Romance". We went from "Metropolis" to "Alice in Wonderland". We went from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Twilight"."

This aging backwards theory doesn't really seem right to me. We've also gone from "Starsky and Hutch" to "The Sopranos". From "Famous Funnies" to "Fullmetal Alchemist". "Pong" to "Portal".

Media generally doesn't grow stupid; it expands. When there's more content, more of it's going to be bad Trying to trace a decline from "Catcher in the Rye" to "Twilight" doesn't work when fifty years after "Catcher" and four years before "Twilight" you have "The Amber Spyglass" (in my mind arguably the greatest young adult novel ever written).

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” It seems to me that the very process of writing your article as well as the posting of comments is a contradiction to this statement. Many times, I have picked up on an idea or point of view that seems to temporarily take control of my mind and the only way I can recover is by giving the material a great deal of thought. In addition, some tweets just make me laugh and there is a place for that, too.

As far as reading goes, as a child I really identified with the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone. My mother often said that if toilet paper had print, I’d read it. It was a bittersweet moment when, after she passed away that I actually found printed toilet paper. To summarize: I was addicted to reading, cereal boxes, comic books and newspapers. In the summer months, every two weeks I would borrow as many books as I could carry. Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.

My two other vices are movies and music. I will give that some thought another day.

A number of years ago, I realized that reading so much really did not make me a better conversationalist, so I started watching popular TV shows. In an attempt to get closer to my kids, I introduced them to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched 24, Lost, Smallville, Ugly Betty, 30 Rock. I rented DVDS to catch up on back episodes. I started feeling empty inside.

A few months ago, I received a Kindle. I downloaded the Blackberry app, and among other books, I have the complete works of Shakespeare (which I read as a teen) as well as the works of Victor Hugo (which I must have missed). I can carry the modern equivalent of the ancient Library of Alexandria in my purse. I have been saved by modern technology.

I recently read a young adult novel by M.T. Anderson called "Feed." It envisions a future where everyone is linked in, all the time, and the Earth is basically dead (shades of BP disaster?). It's sobering to see the potential effects of Internet overload on society as a whole, and on individuals, even in a fictional setting. You might enjoy adding it to your reading list. It's slim enough to get through quickly. I found the writing good, and although it was written for a teen audience, the issues it raises are sophisticated.

This post has reminded me that I need to get back to reading "Bleak House." I've been reading it for months and I'm on page 569 (out of 881). Perhaps it's the internet, perhaps it's high school, perhaps it's just laziness, but I haven't finished it after all these months.

The funny thing is that I don't really care when I finish it. I think that people are too obsessed with the act of finishing things instead of enjoying the process that leads up to the finish. This may be because of the internet, but it is certainly because of shortened attention spans. Sometimes, I get the sense that some people only read books to finish them, so that they can tell people that they read "Bleak House" or "Crime and Punishment" or "War and Peace."

My Literature teacher was telling me about how much he hates "Bleak House" and I can't understand why. It's not a boring book. Quite the contrary, it is endlessly entertaining. I suppose it might be boring if your only purpose in reading it is to get to the end. And of course, it can be depressing for a writer to read because "Dickens was better than everyone else."

But over the past few months of reading "Bleak House," I have loved every word on those 569 pages. When I decided not to hurry through finishing it, I started enjoying it more. As you wrote in your review of "The Squid and the Whale", Dickens is so good that "all you can do is just helplessly stare at the book and turn the pages." When I read "Bleak House", I feel a sense of settling back down into a natural environment, the same way that I feel when I watch a movie like "Nashville" or TV shows like "The Wire" and "Treme." In movies, books, and television, there is too much emphasis on climax, on the end, on the frisson. It is so much easier to enjoy and appreciate art if you relax and surrender yourself to it, instead of trying to surf it for information.

Ebert: One of his greatest. A world to enter. And when he sometimes lets lose for two or three paragraphs of, essentially, prose poems.

Yes! Read...a...book! I feel sorry for today's teenagers--most of them are probably so Tweeted and Facebooked out of their heads, they'll never never know the pleasure of having a well-written book as a companion. And, in a sense, some of these companions never leave you. I just finished "The Shipping News" and re-read the final paragraph twice because it was so beautiful. That and the paragraphs in "Catch-22" that describe what happens when Yossarian unfastens Snowden's flak vest are just two examples of writing that will always stick with me.

Oh yeh. And as I am one of those with whom Roger has connected people, I'm here to tell ya that ol' Ebert is as good at that as he is at picking movies.

I've loved reding since I was a teen and I've loved computers, video games and technology since before that, being probably the only person in my peer group to be BOTH Mac and PC. So my personal solution to the dilemma of a reading frisson VS. a gadget frisson is, as you'd expect, a compromise. I read eBooks.

I've been reading eBooks in most of my portable devices ever since I had a Palm IIIx PDA last century. My first eText was The Hacker Crackdown, a biography of the hacker and cracker movements and one of the first physical books to be available as a free-of-charge downloadable text. Other ebooks folowed. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Star Maker. The Invisible Man. Odd John. A Christmas Carol. Veronika Decides to Die. In Cold Blood. The Da Vinci Code. The Living Shadow. Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency. The list goes on. I'm reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods lately. Next after Gods is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

I also dabbled with a Nook for the first time this week and was pleasantly surprised at how print-like the text on the ePaper screen looks. I'm confident color-screen eReaders are less than two years ahead.

I still like to read hardcovers and paperbacks, but nothing beats finding yourself with unexpected free time, pulling out your cellphone (a Palm Centro, in my case) and picking up where you left off.

Ebert: Would iPad or Kindle be of any use, adapted in some way to your disability? Audiobooks? I feel for you. Stay in touch.

since i use my feet for everything; someone would need to make a ipad remote to be at my feet while the ipad was eye level

Ebert: There is probably someone reading this right now who would know how to do that.

If there is, please post a comment.

Another brilliant post, Roger. I've resisted saying this, but, I think you're as close to George Bernard Shaw as our time and country can get (despite Harlan Ellison possibly wanting that title).

I don't think that the Net is rewiring our brains, no. I think that it just enables us to jump, hop and skip around; to find that instant moment of frisson that may take us a bit longer to find when we've got only one book in our hands, or sitting before one film, and so on...

We've always been looking for instant gratification, and the Net makes it easier for us to try and find it.

I think far from this being a horror, your blog, and your pledge to spend at least an hour a day reading, wisely shows us that we still have control of our own consciousness, and how we decide to use our time and energy.

Bravo to you again. Even though I may harrass you on Twitter (if you even notice my snarky tweets whenever you make a videogame crack, under a more common spelling of my name, combined with a popular Brazilian footballer's),
I genuinely love you and your work, and just by joining Twitter (I only joined to follow you and comment on your reviews from time to time), you have enriched my life in so many ways.

Be well!

I am mindful of the physics law, that with every action comes an equal and opposite reaction. The good that comes from movies, games, tweeting or anything else will be at the expense of something else. When was the last time you saw really beautiful handweiting, for instance? I have a friend who has it, my mom had it, but otherwise it is rare and getting more and more difficult to find. Do you remember the song Video Killed the Radio Star? Notthat it happened, radio stars are still around, but there is no turning back without some kind of catastrophic sea-change, I would think. It is kind of like global warming and evolution. And at some point we just might have a rebirth of humanity - 2001 A Space Oddyssey all over again.

Yes, this resonates strongly with me. On the one hand, I have purposely limited myself to 10 or so favorite websites, nearly all of them newspaper sites. (And I probably only check out YouTube twice a month, and I do not twitter, which to me does seem like a blackhole of time & (mental) energy.) At the same time, I find myself checking and rechecking the news sites, esp. CNN, once an hour or so, looking for an interesting story.

Is it that I no longer have the discipline to stay on a long task, or is it that my life is now organized that I cannot get large chunks of time (esp. with two young children)? My commute itself is too short to get deeply into a novel, though I find I can work my way through 25 or so pages a day, which is sufficient for shorter works (I wouldn't tackle Dickens or Trollope at such a rate). By the time I have more time on my hands, will I be so rewired that I simply can't follow through on a long project? I certainly hope not, and I suppose I should hang onto the fact that I did complete a 2-act play about six months ago and am starting on another. But the lure of the internet is very strong indeed. I would have been much further along 10 or even 5 years ago when the internet was not quite so omnipresent. I would have found a way to use those 15 or 25 minute chunks of time that now feel so insubstantial that I might as well just go online for a quick fix.

As ever, that's for your keen insights.

Ebert: I think Dickens' prose is rich enough that 25 pages a day might be satisfying.

As for Twitter, yes, it is problematical. I like it for three reasons: (1) I follow some wonderful Tweeters. (2) I can bring significant traffic to this site. (3) I can Tweet good writing on the web, and am especially pleased to tweet gifted bloggers who are not as appreciated as they should be. I try to do a good job of Tweeting to deserve being followed.

Speaking of things that just don't translate from the French, do you remember this vase you tweeted around Mother's Day?

http://twitpic.com/1lscw6

Turns out it may be related to an old French pun. I had my own frisson this morning when I read this passage in a book of old puzzles:

"In his book on poetry published in 1730, the German critic Johann Christoph Gottsched describes a French painting showing a dead abbot lying in a meadow: 'The artist, obeying I know not what unseemly custom, stuck a lily into the body's bare bottom.' Gottsched astutely deciphered the hidden meaning of this allegory:

Abbé mort en pré, au cul lys.

Or, read phonetically in Latin:

Habe mortem prae oculis.

(keep death before thine eyes)."

Thus, the comical image of a a lily sticking out of a priest's derriere becomes a sobering reminder to be aware of our own mortality.

I tracked down Gottsched's book (paragraph 8 on the linked page for those who know German; isn't Google wonderful?), but alas, I couldn't find the original painting referred to.

Anyhow, this seemed like just the kind of wordplay you'd appreciate, so I thought I'd share this frisson with you.

--Peter

Ebert: (1) If anyone can find that painting, Marie Haws will. (2) What was the name of that 1950s British comedy with a daisy stuck in someone's derriere?

Our brains are constantly being rewired with everything we do repeatedly. So don't fret.

Are you in fear of losing deep thought or in fear of the nation losing this ability?

I am sure you and the nation spends time repeatedly thinking about other things. We can and will reach our deeper thoughts. Of no doubt it is only natural we return there.

Frisson, in your context of new and constant stimulus from the net, is instinct. Like gathering all the food in the area to survive or gathering all the information on your enemy. Granted, we don't really need all this trivial stuff. But something must feed the ego. Are we better than so and so because of this and that? Maybe we can put it down like the candy we don't need. But it tastes so good to feed our ego. It is so hard to put it down.

We can change our thoughts for the better, that is what reading or cognitive therapy is all about.

"Is an addiction to video games the ultimate expression of this erosion of our attention span?"

I'm not a dedicated gamer but I felt the need to reply to this quote directly. I'm unsure if I agree or disagree with this quote, but I'm sure my own experience with video games may be of some interest here.

I've attempted to play video games on many occasions and I have been unsuccessful in completing them in every case. It seems to me that many games take a great deal of dedication to complete them. I've tried to play certain games that you may, or may not, have heard of such as Bioshock and Batman: Arkham Asylum. In every case, I quit playing them rather quickly. It seems my attention span was actually too short to complete the tasks. I was unwilling to search for certain objects and find ways to complete the game. But on the other hand, I do play sports games on occasion. Sports game are different, in my opinion. I believe they are made for individuals with a much shorter attention span. I often play one 10 minute game of soccer, and then I play another and so on. What attention does that really require?

On the other hand, I have friends who are gamers. It seems to me, rather than completing the primary "missions" of the game, they are more interested in playing online against one another. Games like Call of Duty 2 (or 5, I really don't know, nor care) where they just get online and see who can shoot each other the most. What sort of attention span does that require?

I guess it completely depends on what a gamer is looking for. Furthermore, I seriously doubt a game, even supposed great games like Bioshock, deserve to take up hours and hours of my time, which I believe could be much better served watching multiple films or listening to multiple albums, in less than the amount of time it takes to complete a video game. Video games just take up way too much time and seem to serve little in the way of enlightenment, even those where you have to pay close attention to detail to complete the game. I gain much more from watching 2 hours of Tokyo Story, or listening to 70 minutes of the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St. than I would ever get from playing several hours of Bioshock. Of course, that does not explain why I sometimes play a soccer game like FIFA 10 for hours.....

I'll end that thought there. To discuss video games was obviously not the intention of this blog entry....

And the music in that video is absolutely enchanting (I too found myself smiling when the lady smiled shyly at the camera, even though at the time I thought you were referring to the man in the back). If you really enjoyed that music, and if you are unfamiliar with African music, I strongly recommend you check out some African musicians, such as Franco Luambo Makiadi, Amadou & Mariam, and Tabu Ley Rocherau. It's a very special kind of music.

And "frisson", that's a word I believe I'll never forget now. Thanks for sharing.

Since we already have a week devoted to not watching TV, how about a week (or at least a day each week) devoted to not surfing the Internet?

I use to read books voraciously. Now, due to time spent on the Internet (not even including time spent writing blogs, which vies for time spent working on my novel), I've been reading the same book for several months. I find, like you, that the best place to read is either someplace other than my room (where my computer is), or if I do read in my room, to read with my computer in sleep mode. That way, there's no image on the screen to distract me, no fan turning to tell me that the computer is available and ready for use.

As for video games, my parents would set limits on how long my siblings and I could play games for. This was more to protect our eyes than to protect our attention spans, but I think taking that concept and applying it to Internet usage, and sticking to those limits (even if it's only to limit the number of times in a day that we go online) would be helpful in "rewiring" our brains back to their complex selves. Other things that would help: memorizing poems (the longer the better) or monologues in plays, learning a new language, studying some aspect of our world (history, science, art, culture, the environment), and writing long letters to each other. Not emails. Not tweets. Long hand-written letters. And playing board games, and using our imaginations like children do to role play. Heck, join a community theater! Memorization and creativity combined!

As I fell into the rhythm of the words, as I savored the way Dickens was planting his signposts for the development of the plot, as I watched him create unforgettable characters in a page or two, I felt a kind of peace. This wasn't hectic. I wasn't skittering around here and there. I wasn't scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading.

That's one reason I enjoy films by Yasujiro Ozu and Edward Yang and Hirokazu Kore-eda: their films force me to slow down. As do novels. As do short stories. As do poems. As do symphonies, plays, paintings, operas, chamber pieces, sonatas, and concertos. As does a walk outside on a warm day. As does contemplating the mysteries of the universe from a park bench.

So, to all you Tweeters and bloggers and web surfers out there (myself included), I say: go outside. Get lost in a book. See a movie. Play. Contemplate. Live.

Another intriguing post, and one that's raised a lot of interesting questions.

I've been on the Internet now for something close to twenty years, and I still adore the flood of information streaming in front of my eyes, feasting on it like it Tantalus unchained. For me, the 'net feeds both an intellectual and social curiosity. Like many, I read voraciously, and while I haven't been able to physically travel as far as I would like (come on Lottery), my mental journeys have fostered a sense of global cultural identity that feels far more familiar to me than my own home.

I get the impression that, in the U.S., we have become so fed up with the Balkanization of social, political, intellectual, and religious systems that we are choosing to disconnect rather than participate. That we have become so dissatisfied with the spiritual emptiness of our consigned pigeonholes, that we turn to the 'net as an ideal social Shangri-La; a place where truth matters, voices may be heard, and opinions respected rather than dismissed out of hand. A place where pigeonholes no longer exist.

Perhaps people are realizing that the world they are being sold is not as rich with possibility as the advertisers say, and thus it holds less and less interest for them. Like viewers of a poorly written movie, they have lost interest in the plot, and are shuffling their cheeks in the chairs, sneaking glances at their watches for time remaining.

The Internet eases this intellectual ennui by stimulating a type of social discourse our current societal structure discourages or outright disallows. Perhaps this desire for frisson stems from a subconscious awareness of a spiritual void - the mind hungering for something, anything, worthy of filling the soul. Perhaps we're becoming "intellectual drifters" in an attempt to put form to an emerging ideal. To create a new reality where the empty ideologies of the past are ripped from the garden so the possibility of the future can finally take root.

If web surfing leads a reader to a movie critics blog page which in turn encourages said reader to spend less time surfing the web with very convincing arguments, can the web surfing be considered strictly bad?

This question is provoked by the irony of a blog warning against the dangers of surfing the internet. I think here, as in many things, moderation is important. This article has encouraged me to take a bike ride, and make plans to head to my local library tomorrow.

Great post as usual, Roger.

I feel the same way about these frissons. I don't know how many times a day I check twitter for new stories, blog entries, short clips, and one liners. It's no longer a want but a need. If I miss more than twenty-four hours of twitter, it means I have to click on the "More" button at the bottom of the screen at least three to six times just to get up to date.

Sometimes, it's a reward, sometimes it's a waste of time as I find myself reading tweets of the same sort, or tweets that have no relevance and add nothing to me. Still, thanks to some of the people I follow, individually brilliant tweets make up for dozens of "ok" or below average tweets.

I love the internet nowadays the world is quite literally at the tips of my fingers. I love what it has to offer but I hate that it's becoming more of a need than a want.

I used to go and sit on this cafe. It's on the Nile and the view is simply beautiful. The cafe has been there for decades. My father would sit at this cafe and my grandfather did the same years ago. It's very relaxing and I get to gaze down at the streaming river. I often spend about an hour there alone just thinking about whatever comes to mind. The harmony with nature helps me dig deeper into my thoughts.

However over the past few months this hour of relaxation has become shorter and shorter. Why? No WiFi.

I think your blog entry has encouraged me to go back there and spend more time there sitting with the old, poor and very wise owners of the cafe. In fact, I'll probably end this comment and go there right away. I'll even tell them about this blog entry and see what they have to say about this concept of our brains getting re-wired.

I don't know what it is, but I love spending time with people of old age. I get to read novels and short stories out loud to my grandfather. He prefers me reading since his eye sight isn't what it used to be. Still, I love reading for him. His selection of books is always that of an intellectual. The other day, we were enjoying "The Thief and the Dogs" by Naguib Mahfouz. He asked me to read the English translation rather than the Arabic version because he knows the Arabic version by heart and loves "how the story sounds different in English". Last week we read Samuel Beckett. Before that we read Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Cao Xueqin, Tawfik el-Hakim, etc.

One of my dearest friends here in Cairo is an old lady by the name of Doris. She's around 80 years old and teaches English Literature to Egyptians. She's also married to an Egyptian and we discuss many novels, short stories and paintings. The younger friends of mine are only interested in going out and getting drunk, placing bets and gambling on billiards. When they ask me for film recommendations, I don't know how to reply. If I recommend some of the mediums masterpieces, they'll fall asleep half-way-through.

Besides all that I watch between two and four movies a day. They vary from new releases, to films I choose to revisit. On top of that, there's twitter, meeting up with friends, writing for my blog and checking emails. There's only so much a man can fit into his daily activities. I just hope the virtual activities don't take over everything else.

Roger, your entry is a wonderful reminder to try to maintain a balanace between internet and everything else.

Ebert: Your love for your grandfather has long been apparent, and now I clearly sense that he is so cultured and intellectual. Your hours with him are a treasure that will pay interest all the days of your life.

"I was told about Twitter. I vowed I would never be a Twit, and now I am one. At this moment I have nearly 156,000 Followers. That's not because I'm famous like Britney Spears or Ashton Kucher, but because I am a very good Tweeter. I took to it naturally; it entertains me."

I'm hoping tongue was firmly planted in cheek, Roger, otherwise you need detoxing.

Reply to: "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Nope, that won't do it.

The muscles of the eye get tired holding a focus at a certain distance.

If you have two monitors... say, a small monitor on your desk, and a cable that runs to a plasma TV on the other side of the room... and you switch back and forth, that can help.

But your eye still has to hold a precise focus for long periods. And it gets tired.

I don't even have the patience for videogames anymore. I can't remember the last game I finished.

Great article. As both a long time gamer and web addict, I agree that frisson is what most people are mistaking as substance or art.

However, I think there is something to be said about the massive time investment that goes into video games -- and not just that it will (and, if you like video games, believe me, it WILL) take a lot of time from other endeavors -- but also that frisson is not occurring during most of that time. As a matter of fact, much of my time playing countless games has been spent in thought, planning or appreciating the graphics, or some nice little touch the programmers threw in... Video games become a second life, almost literally. I don't think the brain can tell the difference. To boil games down to JUST a moment or moments of frisson is to reveal that, if fact, you have spent next to no time playing them, because if you had, you would presumably enjoy them, and the reason for this would be that you were open to the experience of being swept up into another world. Not JUST because you want to see how someone's head explodes or feel the thrill of flying a fighter jet. Video games have a LOT of down time. And it's during this time that other emotions that are not frisson occur, as the gamer experiences the act of navigating a virtual world with their virtual avatar. In navigating this world, structural artistry (of the game) sticks out, much like when navigating a cathedral. How can you blame gamers for equating the games to art when so much deliberate and painstaking thought and collaboration is put into their construction?

Some two years ago, I made a promise to myself that I would read more. In an effort to accomplish this, I have since refused to see any movie, no matter how great my anticipation, without first reading its source material (original screenplays are exempt from this, of course).

The first time I did this was for a film I had wanted to see for a long time-- Revolutionary Road. DiCaprio and Winslet are my two favorite actors and I don’t think Mendes gets nearly enough respect as a director.

So, I set about reading the Richard Yates novel. I love the film. However, it will never compare to the novel. His prose is so malevolent and his characters so malicious that at times I felt like I was being injured, but in a wonderful way that said to me, “You are not simply reading a novel. You are being affected by it.”

I would read the novel after class in the library as I waited for my next class to start. But, I began to think of class as just the time between readings. But, the book is so mentally and emotionally taxing that I don’t think I could have gotten through it without the occasional 50-minute respite from the torturous lives of the Wheelers.

What I experienced was not so much “frisson” as epiphany. I realized that my life could never be the same after reading that book. It’s the kind of moment that happens very rarely. In my life, I have had three such epiphanies. Yates’ novel, the Coens’ “A Serious Man,” and the first time I learned about the Big Bang and realized that every atom in my body, in one way or another, had been around since the beginning of time and would exist, in some form, forever.

These are moments that must be earned. They can not be achieved through “frisson.” These moments require effort, thought, and the ability to be truly enveloped by an experience. My fear is that our brains are being rewired to minimize effort, preclude thought, and dull experience.

Have you read “Sex, Time, and Power” by -----. It’s a seminal work in evolutionary biology, and I highly recommend it for someone as interested in evolution as you.

Also, I’m not sure if you have seen this article or not. It is a comedy article but it touches very seriously on the ways in which video games are designed to be addicting.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

- Anthony

I think it's reasonable to think that if the change to the brain can occur in six days of internet use, then remedying it is also possible. Those things that one develops over long periods of time, often entire lifetimes, prove to be the immovable obstacles to development. Indolence is much easier to combat when you've only practiced it for two days than three or longer.

Nonetheless, isn't that old news? The internet reduces lakes to puddles?

Also, I happen to think video games have the potential to be art. The only thing lacking right now is the reflection of those playing them.

Of course, posting a comment here won't help the problem, but I was thinking about this over the weekend myself. Last week I was in Cleveland for a funeral, and on the flight, cut off from the internet, I managed to write ten pages of a new screenplay and read about 300 pages of Proust (A three volume set that tells its own story: the first volume is beat-up from going places, the second volume is a little scuffed from one particularly ambitious attempt in college, the third volume, pure as the driven snow). Usually I manage to write five pages if I'm on a roll and Proust just glares at me from the bedside table.

I remember the weekend in college that I realized I had to finish Ulysses or fail a class I was taking—it was Thanksgiving and I wasn't going home or anywhere else; I curled up in my dorm room and tore through it. That kind of concentration is inconceivable to me now. Perhaps the secret is living on a plane. Although the seatback magazine did mention in-air WiFi, coming soon. Maybe some sort of balloon?

Ebert: I don't WANT wi-fi on airplanes!

Brilliant Entry,amazing because I was just talking about this with my family. What is the point of maintaining an information based society if the info cannot be used --usefully---! For example, why can't all this info be used to get ---anything done--- ---any problems solved--- etc. I was born in '82' my concept of the times Ive lived through= precious few problems solved, many many many more gained, and having older people tell us that we're the generation that will make the difference and solve the problems- on Maher the other day, an activist on the show now said that it's the generation that's in high school NOW that is really the one that will fix these problems.
You are right when you say something has happened. We are distracting ourselves to death because the problems we've created are now insolvable without huge drops inn especially with capitalism as status quo. Maybe if capitalists societies truly cared about educating scientists, we might have a chance. Instead, these positions are guarded as elite status positions, with the competion for slots becoming so extreme that prescription speed use is becoming commonplace in universities.
The average unemployed person can't decide that he's going to use this extra time to help solve the world problems. If we truly valued contribution and working together this wouldn't be the case. Instead, jobs which have a positive benefit have now become protected by those who are lucky enough to do them. This is what I hate the most about the enviromental movement- it's failure to criticize a society that doesn't allow someone to put in a 4 hour a day workday to solving climate change for example because that's all they can offer.
Capitalism wastes human resources.

Without reading the description you gave I clicked on the video above and just assumed the guitarist was a woman. The eyes and cheekbones just seemed feminine to me, and I've come across women with the name Ronnie in fact.

As for frissons, I'm very aware of how much time and attention social networking steals from my writing and my reading. I don't watch tv much at all, in fact I don't have cable and only really get shows from the library. I thought I was doing better than your average person for staying away from distraction until I realized that most days I have Tweetdeck running, my instant messenger client on, and will check my email a few times a day. Now that I'm aware of what it's doing to my ability to slow down and read in depth I'm going to be rethinking all this.

Ebert: I thought the guitarist was a woman. Apart from the bandana, it was the smile. I'm not saying a man can't have a smile that beautiful, but not many do.

To the disabled Seth, I too have a disability (chronic pain) that makes it painful to deal with books, especially big textbooks because I have to sit in a recliner to read instead of a nice desk where you can put your notebook down next to your text and not bother with balancing stuff on your lap. I've found both the Kindle and the iPad useful, Kindle for newspapers and iPad for PDFs and new media. Audiobooks are brilliant but slow u down considerably.

Ebert: I sit in a recliner and use the Levenger Lap Desk to hold my laptop and papers. Keeps the laptop's heat off my legs...

Your website is the only site I go to. I come here and read for a while and then I get off the computer. I've always been like this with the internet and things in general; if I don't feel passion for something, then I won't be involved. If I don't find meaning in something, then I'm not involved. I often don't get a lot of sleep I suppose because I have a crappy bed, so I'm often in a kind of stupor where I can't hold my attention on things (I hope it's from lack of sleep since I don't do the web surfing or much tv watching) or really think in general, like how you mentioned you were on your cancer medication; I've lived most of my life like that. At first lack of sleep was by choice, but now it's not and I hope it will be over one day and I will get out of this stupor, but it's MY stupor and not the kind of stupor you are referring to here. It's possible I might have this kind of rewiring, but I've long hated the internet--and still do--and haven't really found much precise information because it is really hard, on this information superhighway, to find a precise bit of information without having to go through all these other site that pop up by keywords and popularity (I assume); so you better hope that what information you are looking for is the soup of the day or week or whatever or else you'll never find it in the millions of site that pop up after using the search engine. On a side note: for this same reason, you will definitely NOT like video games, because it will take you hours or days of rigorous just to learn how to use the controller and then when you do and you're running around in circles, you realize how crudely the game is really just about all the shooting or whatever; you kind of have to be as great as Die Hard at shooting guys if you want it to be entertaining in that "art" way; basically, I do not know how to use these controllers; they just seem to unnatural: there are two thumb joysticks, and also a regular directional pad (the up,down,left,right arrow type part), and about 8 other buttons, not including that the thumb joysticks also work as buttons when you push them down (so, that's 10 different buttons); like I said, it just plain feel natural.

Now, I think I'll comment on the blog:

One thing I think may be the cause of all the misery in the world is abuse, which emerges from a kind of lack of manners and civility etc. Maybe all of these things are abusing us, which has become so mainstream, along with many of the people around that are abusing us.

How is it abuse? First of all, I would say abuse begins at an utter lack of kind of even acknowledging that another person exists, which is kind of perfect for these advertising mediums (how they insult out intelligence while rewiring them!); so it probably arises as a self-esteem issue. There are people out there who don't connect with people by lack of any kind of validation--often, if not always, just plain ignoring things you have to say--and what have you and then they proceed to judge you, kind of trying to act like God, and that's how they live their entire lives; they just sit around and judge people and everything they say is a form of this and it's quite scary because they start out from a place of kind of not acknowledging you exist; so you're alone in the scary world being judged, you see, except not by God, by some person who has issues themselves they need to deal with and the cycle goes on and on: their kids or are going to do this, having systematically been stripped of self-esteem by constant abuse and then go on abusing everyone they meet etc. So, it seems they don't realize they are abusing people sometimes or perhaps much of the time or who knows, abuse just being the only thing they were taught, instead of having self-esteem, by being these abusive helicopter parents. So we're being abused by this helicopter abusive culture.

The problem with this is this might be the first form of humans. We might have started from a kind of comparing ourselves to others. To start off, let's just say we are religious creatures, and how a fat person just a couple hundred years ago was probably seemed to be blessed by the money god and everywhere we look, we are comparing ourselves to someone else. So, we joke with each other and poke fun at certain things we do: hahah, you're bowling god didn't is not as good as my bowling god, or whatever. But with abuse, it is like taking this part of humanity at its lowest part, like "If I judge you non-stop, then I'll have crushed you and then I'm better than you." So, there's this envious side to us where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others and usually in a kind of joking way, but with abuse, there's no sense of humor there. There's a kind of "I am God, and will crush you with my judging...so, I can feel good about me" mentality. This isn't the God of the movie Junebug where a women says "God loves you too much to allow you to stay that way", to say the least.

So, I think the easy path of abusiveness for self-esteem is dominating right now. Like I said, people don't seem to realize that they are abusing, until one day, they've slapped their kids or a person on the street or whatever and then they still might just keep doing it because of the self-esteem issues and it's an easier way to get it; just crush those around you by not acknowledging they exist and then judge them. So, I think that's why reality shows are doing better. It's all about judging the other guy. The thing about these reality shows is that probably off of the set, they are probably really nice to each other; so it's not even real abuse, but to the people watching, they actually do abuse each other away from the television; they really do ignore people, without pay. Remember that reality show where the girl defecates on the stairs? That says it all right there.

Mike wrote, Yes! Read...a...book! I feel sorry for today's teenagers--most of them are probably so Tweeted and Facebooked out of their heads, they'll never never know the pleasure of having a well-written book as a companion.

I don't believe that. Granted, I'm not exactly a teenager anymore, as I'll turn 25 in a couple months, but I've had a regular internet access, with all that it entails (email, icq back when it was cool, etc), since I was 13 or so. I've been on Facebook for about as long as it's been open to more than just American students, on Twitter for about a year (though I'm a pretty circumspect poster myself). I've been a gamer for about as long as I can remember. On the other hand, I also grew up among books, reading anything I could lay my hands on, from Belgian comics to Jules Verne to Michael Moorcock to John Steinbeck. Now I'm getting my MA in American literature, and I'm an avid moviegoer and an aspiring writer. How much of a living contradiction does that make me?

To come back to the topic at hand, namely, modern teenagers, I really do believe that they will read if you give them something they can connect to. Yes, sometimes, this something is going to be Twilight, which I would never dream of calling a well-written book, but it doesn't have to be. Teenagers are, by nature, curious creatures. If you manage to grab their interest (which, I'll readily admit, can sometimes be hard to do), they'll follow you pretty much anywhere. And teenagers, above all else, talk to one another; if you manage to "sell" The Catcher in the Rye to one of them, you've sold it to ten or fifteen of them.
So I wouldn't feel too sorry for teenagers, if I were you. If you give them the chance to surprise you, they will.

Ebert: The ones I've met here certainly have.

By the way, CONGRATULATIONS on finishing your thesis on CORMAC!

I require a watching of Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" and "Stalker" at least once per six months, to at least partially 'rewire' my brain back towards contemplativeness.

"Stalker" becomes more and more elegiac each time I watch it; it speaks to a human condition that, with each passing of six mere months, seems further eroded.

Everything in moderation.

If like you said facebook looks inward while twitter looks outward, books simply stay with you in the moment, suspended in time.

It's a physical being of harmony. It's not taxing, if you're reading a good book.

I used to burn through books like banana bread on Sunday mornings, one after another, totally addictive. I pile all my to-reads on one end of the window sill by my reading chair, and when I finish a book I'd place it on the other end of the window sill. It's always satisfying to see how fast I can move the pile from one end to the other. And then even more satisfying to bag them all up to the library and get a new batch.

Twitter is the devil of time-consumer. I'm going to start back off some. The youtube videos and 500 word articles are interesting and all, but just not as satisfying as a great read. This weekend I stayed off it for 1.5 day, and managed to finish a book.

Ebert: Inquiring minds want to know: Which book>?

I don't read as much as I used to. I think it's because I've been on the net too much looking at your reviews Mr. Ebert lol.

The net's awesome. It gives so much easier access to knowledge than ever before. Am I guilty of not using it for such a purpose and instead peruzzing gossip blogs? Yes. But, if I wanted to look up how this economic crisis began, I could probably get a few easy-to-understand articles in 15 minutes or less. Or if I wanted to learn who the Nobel Laureates in Literature are so that I could read their books, I can in a jiffy on Google. For all of its bad parts, the internet also presents the opportunity to educate in amazing ways that I am a huge fan of.

I'm 18 years old. I'm a child of this new techno era. Now that I'm graduating high school in a few months, that idea of how you never see most of your high school friends after high school seems to be more myth than maxim since facebook, myspace, and twitter exist. I grew up swarmed with intelligent blogs like this one, and with ones that claim Obama is a facist dicator who'll pull the plug on grandma after he's exterminated the private sector. Yet I came out in one piece. I think its ironic that for how much the Net has lowered our attention span (which it has), it's provided so much useful information and perspective that wasn't easily available before. It's a good thing for being so bad.

I've read your blog for a long time- felt like I should finally participate :P

I realized a few months ago that I hadn't read a book for fun in... how long? Being a film student in college, I spent most of my time watching movies and doing school work. But even so, it was getting to the point where sitting down to watch a two hour movie felt like a big commitment (that may have more to do with the workload than my attention span).

I gave myself all the usual excuses not to read- it'll take too long, it's boring, etc. But I managed to sit down and go through a Sherlock Holmes novel (The Valley of Fear) and found it surprisingly easy. Once I got over the inertia of picking up the book, it was like riding a bike.

Now I'm in the middle of V for Vendetta, and looking down the docket at The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Son Also Rises, and maybe a Patrick O'Brien story. I'm also going to try to write something that *GASP!* isn't a script.

Nicholas Kelly:

"In movies, books, and television, there is too much emphasis on climax, on the end, on the frisson. It is so much easier to enjoy and appreciate art if you relax and surrender yourself to it, instead of trying to surf it for information."

In making everything feel like a climax, the actual climaxes of a lot of movies become kind of blah. I was shocked at the ending of Iron Man 2- the final fight scene with the main villain felt like an afterthought. Even the big finishing move. There was no build up to anything or sense of dynamics. It's all one, over loud volume level. Sigh.

Don't worry, I don't see you getting into video games, funnily enough I don't even have the patience anymore for them after basically a whole life playing them. I think the internet has made me too impatient. I got rid of our cable because I thought that was giving me the short attention span, turns out it's the internet.

I'm going to start turning my computer off cold unless I need to be actively doing something, so I can't just sit down and check CNN or my email and meander into looking stupid crap up like the history of vinegar.

You can watch someone do a walkthrough of ICO or Shadow of Colossus on youtube if you're bored enough. Even if you're pretty rich, I wouldn't recommend buying a PS2 just to confirm your own suspicion that you don't like video games. A PS3 is a fantastic BluRay/dvd player though.

I got an e-mail about this - but didn't know what the heck Tom dark was talking about - until I went over to Roger's Twitter site and found the link to his latest entry. Then ultimately this, by Indian Idiot:

(Hi Marie BIG WAVE I've MISSED YOU SO!)

"Get Marie Haws on twitter, by any means necessary, it is greatly impoverished without her charming & witty presence."

First: I miss chatting to you too!

Second: there's a heady frisson to be had in hunting for things yourself, in playing Miss Marple and following the bread crumbs. In short, I love to explore - to boldly go where no snooper has gone before and all that.

Part of my pathology is actively driven by insatiable curiosity, and why I'd rather spend my time spelunking. Besides, whenever I find something really neat I share it inside the Ebert Club Newsletter; which is kinda like Tweeting in that sense, only with pictures and video too.

I recently found the best trailer I've seen all year:

"Machotraildrop" - http://www.machotaildrop.com/

Note: it was filmed in Vancouver, Canada (that's the Second Narrows Bridge you see, located about 8 miles from my Apt.) and Budapest Hungry (for the Castle scenes.)

I never would have stumbled upon it however, if I hadn't be out exploring and stuff; smile. And it's now been added to my Holy Grail list, as I must see this film - and it's still playing Festivals, meaning I'll have to wait, dammit.

At last report, it played the Santa Cruz Film Festival in May, 2010.

WHY hasn't it scored itself a distributor?! It looks totally awesome! I even stuck it in the last Newsletter, such was the state of my awe.

All of which is to say, I'll leave the tweeting to Roger. :)

P.S. besides, I'm too wordy for Twitter. I think I'd have a brain seizure if I had to limit myself to shorthand. Moreover, where's the fun in that?!

Smile.

Ebert: Marie, take my earnest advice. Don't start Tweeting. It would be like asking a champion mile runner to do the distance heel-to-toe.

If someone were to hand you the controller, Roger, I only pray they don't also pop in some gory title that looks pretty, but has no substance. Games like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil are true gaming artistry, but you won't find them on and best seller lists.

Roger, I have a few things you simply must consider in light of what you have written...

1) Read "Mao II" by Don DeLillo

(or other Don DeLillo in general -- David Cronenberg is filming his "Cosmopolis" sometime in the near future, a story about a rich, decadent man who is able to live his life roaming around a city without ever leaving his limo; Colin Farrell stars). DeLillo has been contemplating what you speak of here for quite some time. His "Mao II" is about a cult-famous writer who lives in seclusion and has a theory that past a certain point technology (and what it brings: the quest for frisson, awareness of perpetual connectedness with the whole world, a pace of new information so fast and the wealth of it so overwhelming that it cannot be organized) creates a society of mindless robots who, even and especially in the city, are shifted about like cattle -- walk sign says walk, stop sign says stop -- and that these people are so over-stimulated by the world around them always trying to get their attention and tell them something important that their minds can't handle it. It's like a drug overdose of sorts. They become zombies who surrender to the most basic of intellectualism-- money, buying clothes and products (capitalism), sex, sports, violent entertainment -- because they can no longer make sense of the world. There are just too many competing voices and they need simplest, most superficially meaning things to provide them a sense of a stable base for their life.

The key conclusion of this author's theory -- the punchline if you will -- is that terrorism (or just catastrophe on the news in general) becomes the only thing that grabs people attention anymore. The rest of the novel deals with many things, not least of which is whether the terrorist or the writer will have more influence in future societies, whether writers can live in isolation as protest or whether this is a vain cause. Also, how DeLillo writes spends much time focusing on the changing nature of groups of bodies in society. The novel begins with a cult of hundreds of people deciding they want to be collectively married. Is this just progressive thinking or the end of individuality?

Ps. "Mao II" was written in 1991 and has many references to The World Trade Center towers as symbols... The cover of DeLillo's "Underworld" (which DeLillo disappeared for half a decade to research before writing), was published pre-9/11 and has the two towers and a bird that looks like a plane flying nearby them. Many have commented that DeLillo is a prophet. Harold Bloom lists DeLillo as one of the small handful of great contemporary authors, alongside Cormac McCarthy for example.

2) I read this book in a first year "Intertextualities" English course taught and organized by B.W. Powe,

a professor at York University in Toronto who is also a former understudy (and now an expert on) Marshall McLuhan, and a writer who grew up in a family of writers. His vision for the course, from what I gathered, is a world of, as I mentioned up above, overwhelming floods of voices competing for dominance over what people believe to be true and meaningful. He traces influences through various poems (T.S. Eliot), novels (Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") and plays ("Waiting for Godot", Tennesse Williams' most eccentric play "Camino Real" which has the infamous line by Lord Byron: "Make journeys. There is nothing else.")... Perhaps this is not so original or perhaps it is, and Professor Powe was mostly trying to stress the idea of writers hearing and being influenced by the voices of other writers (by showing us how voices exist and influence people in society in general), but in any case, and speaking now as a member of my generation of media-addicts, I believe that more and more this is the world we are living in. More precisely, it is the world we always were living in but technology such as the internet has only made this more apparent to us. Some of us try to grapple with it, others are so subconsciously/emotionally terrified that they become perpetual frisson seekers. ("Oh em gee!"ers.) Roger, I have a few things you simply must consider in light of what you have written...

1) Read "Mao II" by Don DeLillo

(or other Don DeLillo in general -- David Cronenberg is filming his "Cosmopolis" sometime in the near future, a story about a rich, decadent man who is able to live his life roaming around a city without ever leaving his limo; Colin Farrell stars). DeLillo has been contemplating what you speak of here for quite some time. His "Mao II" is about a cult-famous writer who lives in seclusion and has a theory that past a certain point technology (and what it brings: the quest for frisson, awareness of perpetual connectedness with the whole world, a pace of new information so fast and the wealth of it so overwhelming that it cannot be organized) creates a society of mindless robots who, even and especially in the city, are shifted about like cattle -- walk sign says walk, stop sign says stop -- and that these people are so over-stimulated by the world around them always trying to get their attention and tell them something important that their minds can't handle it. It's like a drug overdose of sorts. They become zombies who surrender to the most basic of intellectualism-- money, buying clothes and products (capitalism), sex, sports, violent entertainment -- because they can no longer make sense of the world. There are just too many competing voices and they need simplest, most superficially meaning things to provide them a sense of a stable base for their life.

The key conclusion of this author's theory -- the punchline if you will -- is that terrorism (or just catastrophe on the news in general) becomes the only thing that grabs people attention anymore. The rest of the novel deals with many things, not least of which is whether the terrorist or the writer will have more influence in future societies, whether writers can live in isolation as protest or whether this is a vain cause. Also, how DeLillo writes spends much time focusing on the changing nature of groups of bodies in society. The novel begins with a cult of hundreds of people deciding they want to be collectively married. Is this just progressive thinking or the end of individuality?

Ps. "Mao II" was written in 1991 and has many references to The World Trade Center towers as symbols... The cover of DeLillo's "Underworld" (which DeLillo disappeared for half a decade to research before writing), was published pre-9/11 and has the two towers and a bird that looks like a plane flying nearby them. Many have commented that DeLillo is a prophet. Harold Bloom lists DeLillo as one of the small handful of great contemporary authors, alongside Cormac McCarthy for example.

2) I read this book in a first year "Intertextualities" English course taught and organized by B.W. Powe,

a professor at York University in Toronto who is also a former understudy (and now an expert on) Marshall McLuhan, and a writer himself. His vision for the course, from what I gathered, is a world of, as I mentioned up above, overwhelming floods of voices competing for dominance over what people believe to be true and meaningful. He traces influences through various poems (T.S. Eliot), novels (Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") and plays ("Waiting for Godot", Tennesse Williams' most eccentric play "Camino Real" which has the infamous line by Lord Byron: "Make journeys. There is nothing else.")... Perhaps this is not so original or perhaps it is, and Professor Powe was mostly trying to stress the idea of writers hearing and being influenced by the voices of other writers (by showing us how voices exist and influence people in society in general), but in any case, and speaking now as a member of my generation of media-addicts, I believe that more and more this is the world we are living in. More precisely, it is the world we always were living in but technology such as the internet has only made this more apparent to us. Some of us try to grapple with it, others are so subconsciously/emotionally terrified that they become perpetual frisson seekers. (Maybe underneath all the posing for others -- since we're also Nixon-paranoid now about the rest of the world seeing us -- they look something like that blackhole-eyed ragdoll illustration from "The Wall" as Roger Waters sings "Craaazee.")

And all this, as you will recall from "We Live in Public", is very much in line with what internet entrepreneur Josh Harris predicted, interviewed here by Errol Morris (another genius who was interested in this before others):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT3JukAZlW8

3) All this considered, sometimes it is the superficial who are actually the deepest thinkers. What if there really is no meaning and frisson is actually all there is? ("Make journeys. There is nothing else.") What if all the various interpretations of meaning in the world that various people across the world throw out there is all just... projected. I'm now projecting myself but what if after one knows all there is to know in the world the only thing that's still certain is the intrigue journey through it all. As you yourself said once Roger, when life is over the least one can say was that it was inter... resting.

Ebert: I have read those DeLillo novels. They are so good. Also Libra.

I enjoyed reading this, especially as I've been working my way through The Secret Garden very slowly but your Twitter updates rather quickly. I would also like to say that I enjoy reading everything you write, and I love following you on Twitter—the amount of writing you produce every day gives me a goal to aspire to.

I have spent a lot of time in bed as I am in cancer treatment. When I was in chemo, I couldn't concentrate on novels or the academic non-fiction I used to inhale. I turned to the web for a sense of connection, information, and entertainment.

As I move back to my regular life, I notice that I do not read the same way. I was reviewing a paper last week, and I found myself impatiently jumping forward and backwards in the text, reading non-linearly. I thought perhaps I had developed ADHD as a result of the chemo.

Now I think maybe I'm just lookin to get my frisson on.

Thanks for clarifying.

Ebert: I had the same problem with concentration after surgery. I found myself watching hour after hour of CNN on the Obama-Clinton primaries. I yearned to sleep.

I'm not all that concerned about the WIRED article. As with all scientific studies, more questions are raised than are answered. For example, how do we know that Internet usage alters brain structure or brain chemistry? Is it not also possible that the "Internet veterans" had that brain structure to begin with? If in fact brain structure is being altered, is it not also possible that other factors are involved? A busy workday, for example, involves many distractions from primary tasks. Humans have the ability to switch attention as needed; the concern seems to be that such attention-switching is being reinforced over the ability to focus for long periods. I think it may be a temporary adaptation to immediate stimuli, and that when long-term focus is required, people will just naturally be able to do that even if they are daily Internet users.

I, too, have trouble reading books that are too heavy, or holding books for too long. My answer to this problem: a reader's stand sold by Levenger's, the writer/reader supplier. You can find them in the Internet: Levenger.com I didn't buy mine book holder from them. My husband made me an articulated stand that would hold needlepoint frames in various sizes, while extending to accommodate sitting positions. Then he adapted a removable book holder as an added accessory. God bless his able hands!
Levenger sells book holders in floor models and table models.

Greetings to you and every aerobic two-legged creature.

I get my frisson, essentially, through Cinema, and then Literature and Music and few TV shows on the top of them, Lost; I get all kinds of emotions when I watch that show.
While I was reading your article, I got two frissons - I don't know if the word is countable or not - the first is the article itself, the second is the song Comfortably Numb because I was listening to it for the trillion time when I was reading. I got the first because it involved what I do everyday, and the second because it always does.
I'm reading Dreiser's An American Tragedy after a long and winding quest for it, and a couple of hours ago, I stopped at page 510, the last pages of Book Two; during this, I carry on my other three daily activities, watching films and surfing the net.
The trouble here is: I'm Libyan, and in my country there's no books paradise. I found An American Tragedy by chance and I've always wanted to read it since it's been classified as one of the best 12 American novels, and so far, it deserves to be listed there; however, I still fight with my own urges for classics that I can not find : Joyce's works except Ulysses and The Dubliners (I've been lucky to read them), Kafka's Metamorphosis, Dicken's Our Mutual Friend, all of Cormac McCarthy's works, Anna Karenina, The Aeneid! Oh .. a shocking list of milestones that I can never get, although that I've been blessed by reading dozens. And for my ultimate passion, the reason of me living, Cinema, you would've been shocked if you had knew me personally as a cinemaniac who can never watch Citizen Kane because he can't find it; The Wizard of Oz, Psycho, Dr.Strangelove ... and God, how are they many.
The point here is that the web has profoundly helped me to get some of what I'll never get in our stores: your film articles and blog, Ginsberg's Howl, greatest Victorian Poets, random yet amazing essays on different topics, Divine Comedy .. and the list goes on.
Yes, the web, especially wikipedia, is sometimes an impotent substitute for books, but for some wretched helpless unheard hungry hungry damaged readers like me, it is a good bite, a benign solace for something out of reach.
Finally, I hate to comment on something without a reply, so would you be please to share with someone who's 24/7 busy like you - busy of reading, watching, and then reading an dwatching, and the difference between you and him is luck and, yes, intelligence, I guess, although I'm really intelligent ( Joking? ) - how to make a drastic change in term of making changes, although that he stopped running a long time ago?

Thank you.

P.S. I had a "question" in the Writing exam and it was : Write in more than 50 letters about someone you know. Guess about whom I wrote about; you.
Yea ... film critics can be popular. ( You should make this for your next article, as a sequel for Video Games Can Never Be Art. I think It's gonna work ).

Ebert: How to make a drastic change? Why must you? You sound well involved with your life, and you have the curiosity necessary to a well-lived life.

I sense you want physical books and not online versions, and I agree with you. The book itself is part of the experience. How to find it is, of course, the challenge.

Great article Roger.

Sorry to possibly further distract you, but have you seen "Thru-You"? It's a musical mix of unrelated YouTube clips that is pretty amazing, and gave me that feeling you write about: http://thru-you.com/

I've been writing about [+ in] new literacy and [+ on] the net for - dare I type it - over a decade now: most of the writing itself can be found in various web forums. My latest attempt to frame this type of literacy exists here.

Also see:
The Literacy Control Complex and
Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework>/a>

I can't stop tweetering your to interesting and thought bravocing. I like somethings you say and not others. Mostly like. I tweet inbetween books and chapters depending on how interesting the book is at the time.
There is an other cause to this tweetering is competition on who can get the the news out there first and who has the most followers. The best will always servive just like anything else in life. Tweeting is more interesting than facebook but facebook has the most hits by far. Well I have to get back to my tweetering or I might lose it. Or should I get back to my book ? Alwell what ever. Please keep on tweetering. at less.

I took the novel on the flight to Cannes,. I was up to page 60-something. I started reading, and was drawn in and delighted.
You're doing great! Personally, I've never been inclined toward books. Frequently they just bore me, mind mind wanders, all of a sudden I've gone through 10-odd pages, and I don't remember a thing I've read. It's always been that way, and an obnoxious pressure from other people to read more books has only strengthened my contempt for them. I read more on websites than I would ever have read otherwise. Yes, there is frisson (which is splitting atoms,) but there are also articles that deepen my understanding of things that interested me, so I'm not concerned.

With the invention of channel surfing, and then web surfing, have we all become rewired?
You know McLuhan would say we have. Hot media, cold media, the massage, books, TV and radio, the global village. He'd say each invention changed our evolution as an organism. And of course Cronenberg would take it further by putting VCRs in our chests and video game plugs in the backs of our knecks.

Has the national attention span dropped?
Andy Warhol would say we have. When he was alive, he said we were on our way to having atrophied attention spans that could only focus on any thing for 15 minutes. Of fame, just like he said.

Is that why kids like shallow action pictures and why episodic television is losing to reality shows?
I think part of it is the pay-for-play market. The commercials keep people trained to obey and jump on command. The medium is the massage, remember? (As opposed to "the message," which McLuhan also said.) It massages the brains of impressionable people into whatever shape the media desire, giving them an audience of mindless consumers. Besides that, the schools don't encourage people to think or evaluate ideas for themselves. Hence your next point:

Is that why slogans are replacing reasoning in our political arena?
Schools could and should be teaching people critical thinking skills so that they can evaluate ideas, catch argument fallacies, escape propaganda, reject buzzwords, and act in enlightened self-interest. These things are not unrealistic dreams. They are real and attainable goals. If people had these simple skills, they might think, regarding politics, "Wait, A does not follow from B. Just because he defends the man does not mean he endorses the man's crimes." "I don't really know what socialism is. I'm going to research it." "If we provoke that nation filled with short-tempered idealists, it might blow up in our faces. Maybe we shouldn't poke the hornet's nest. If they attack us, of course we will defend ourselves. But otherwise, we should just leave them alone." "The world cannot possibly be as simple as a comic book. The president talks about evil-doers who hate our freedom, but I think it's more complex than that." "Our government isn't always right, and some of their actions may be harmful to the nation. I better watch them carfully and make sure they don't bully people around." "When I think about it, homosexuality doesn't really affect me directly. I just feel uncomfortable thinking about it. Maybe I should learn to be more tolerant." There is no reason schools can't have classes to teach critical thinking!

Ebert: McLuhan would have so much to say about the internet. In a way, maybe he's already said it.

A Tweet frisson--Roger reports today Guillermo del Toro is off "The Hobbit."

Following a recent remark of mine to Gerardo Valero, I read this old post. Del Toro had been planning on making at least one more movie on horror and childhood, called "Saturn and the End of Days." It is the story of a little boy named Saturn who is watching the end of the world while walking to the supermarket. Yet "recent events" may force him to delay his personal project "several years." I quote del Toro:

"It's like, what would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you while doing errands. You go back and forth and nothing much happens except the entire world is being sucked into a vortex of fire." He added, "The small movies you have much more control. If I say this is the design of a faun and the little girl is going to do this
or that, that's me. In Big Hollywood, you get a 50 page memo. It's horrible. Independent film making is like drawing a comic book; the Hollywood movie is like having five hands holding your hand while you're drawing the comic book."

Forget the Shire. Let's visit Saturn.

I'm twenty-six and have been proudly facebook, twitter, and myspace free for a year. And frankly, it has been wonderful.

Full disclosure, my friends signed me up for facebook, much to my chagrin. So I was not a good acolyte to begin with.

I felt I lost something every time I signed on. Sifting through friend's (or more likely acquaintances) photographs felt perverse. Like I was L.B Jefferies in 'Rear Window' with that absurdly phallic lens, trying to dissect people's lives while succeeding only in the abandonment of my own.

Can you imagine a man like Werner Herzog trolling the Internet for interesting facebook or myspace pages? I often wonder what great works of art or science or math or politics our surfing has cost us.

It's unbelievable how difficult it feels for me to read books now. I grew up devouring the things. Now, my "breaks" consist of web surfing; I spend 10 minutes finding something to watch on Hulu for a 30-minute lunch break.

And yet when I push myself to open a book instead of my laptop, I find myself infinitely more enjoyably lost -- I find the escape so much more worthwhile. It's mind-blowingly simple: the more I invest, the more return I reap.

Roger, a good way to illustrate my hunch that reading on paper is vastly superior to "reading" (er, screening, i call it) on these screens is this: after reading all these comments above, and I love the comments, all of them, we learn so much from what people say, as after-posts to what you said in the original post....i always print out the comments on paper via my printer and read them again slowly on paper, and that what they ideas and info really sink in, and i realize how much I did not process when I read these comments on the pixelly plastic screen. Try it. Reading on screens is not reading. It is a new form of human reading mode and it is way inferior to paper surface reading. We need be careful, no? My fear is that future generations will grow up with dumbed-down critical thinking skills because they never learned to read, -- read! -- on paper. I say this not as a neo-Luddite, but as a Bloomian believer in best choices. Slow these computers down!

Wow... Frisson... we used that word growing up to describe goosebumps! Didn't know what it's "true" meaning was... now I know! :)

My boys love video games -- either console or computer based. They spend a lot of their time playing. Sometimes, they'll do some youtube surfing... Sometimes, they'll catch some Cartoon Network.

But, when they have to go to bed -- or they are stuck in the car on a long trip (we don't do DVDs on trips) -- they crack open the books. The ones they gravitate to lately are video-game based novels (Halo has a series).

They have picked up some of the recent series -- Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Septimus Heap, Artemis Fowl. There are also these illustrated classics in the school library that have found their way in their backpacks and in their beds at night. The Invisible Man and Huckleberry Finn have been favorites.

My boys have found some frissons in books! All hope is not lost!

This really hits home with me. I used to be an avid reader, one who knew the plots of many a book. I'm now a browser, one who knows the counter-indications of a large number of drugs, and one who knows obscure facts about more obscure species of plants. Is it worth it? I find that that it isn't. I haven't read a book in a year. My browsing effects other things too, I have trouble sitting down to watch a television series I own on DVD or Blu-ray. If I watch a film on my computer, I often find myself bored, and searching wikipedia for spoilers.

Somewhere I read that you loathed Cronenberg's Videodrome. I myself re-watched the film about a week ago. Maybe it was ahead of its time, but the film truly echos some of the things you and wired have said here. You know... with television instead of the internet. How did Gibson put it, "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions..."

Another French perspective:

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" -- Blaise Pascal

It's ironic that "man" can now sit quietly in a room all alone and, with the aid of a wifi connection, become more agitated and troublesome than ever before.

This is a timely post for me. Just yesterday my wife and I were roasting dinner over an open fire and all I could think was how agitated I was. I'm not even able to be in the moment enough to enjoy a fire pit under the open sky. Has the internet squeezed the Zen out of me? That's too easy though - I've squeezed it out, by spending too much time on the Huffington Post.

Of course, humanity doesn't really care whether I've personally dumbed myself down. It only becomes an issue if all of humanity is sufficiently dumbed down that we hurt ourselves as a species, because we become unable to focus on real, long-term problems. I worry that the internet is becoming high fructose corn syrup or cholesterol -- slowly and silently making us all unhealthy.

Ebert: Sitting alone quietly has never come easily to me. I need something to read. I liked it when I wore sports coats as a student, because a paperback fit so perfectly into a pocket.

Roger, re the screen vs paper thing: here are some Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader by Verlyn Klinkerborg at nytimes oped who says: "I have been
reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some complaints — not
about the iPad but about the state of digital reading generally.
Reading is a subtle thing, and its subtleties are artifacts of a
venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels
aren’t the same......When I read a physical book, I don’t have to look anywhere else to
find out how far I’ve gotten. The iPad e-reader, iBooks, tries to
create the illusion of a physical book. The pages seem to turn, and I
can see the edges of those that remain. But it’s fake. There are
always exactly six unturned pages, no matter where I am in the book."

Ebert: I've tried reading a book on an iPad and It. Just. Isn't. A. Book.

How is this for hopelessly re-wired:

I took my family to the movies tonight. (Robin Hood, $60 for the 4 of us with concession!)

As we were walking in from the parking lot I instinctively reached down to my hip to check for my phone. My holster was empty. I had left it on the charger.

I considered going back home for it. I had just enough time. Could I sit through this long of a movie without checking Twitter or sending a Tweet. Yeah, I know it's bad form to do that in a theater and I used to silently chew people out for doing that. Now I do it. Ouch.

On an end-of-an-era note: I got an email this week telling me that our Kerasotes Showplace Theater had been sold to AMC. Here in the Midwest, I've been going to movies at a Kerasotes chain theater since the late 70's when I was a cinema usher during high school (for GMC). Now they have sold to AMC. Smart move, I'm sure. And, I imagine that AMC will be okay. It's just a piece of my history gone. One more thing changing.

I think there is certainly truth in your blog, but I wonder if the internet truly rewires the brain, or if the brain is already wired to react to short bits of information differently than it does when it knows you are delving into longer narrative.

As you know, we are bombarded daily with those tiny bits of frisson. There are newscasts with more news scrolling below them; 140 characters of people's lives and thoughts; text messages from friends and family on cell phones.

Getting involved in a book has always been more involving to the brain than television or movies, or bits of electronic text, because it must not only absorb the words, but also create its own images to accompany the text. It must become director, cinematographer, and editor, all-in-one; something it can forego when skimming brief messages. This could very well account for the sense of detachment in them and yes, the want of the brain to take the easy way out and assimilate as much information as possible – which outside of maintaining the physiological aspects of the body, is it’s job.

I do find twitter a bit distracting sometimes, but I may have always had a touch of ADHD anyway. (Can’t you tell from the randomness of my tweets? : ) I do know it has allowed me to be creative, start a blog, and meet some wonderful friends around the globe. I think like anything else, it requires tempering to avoid becoming the one-for-all solution to information.

Read books, my friend. Please read books. Wash and refresh your brain in a good story, intelligent philosophy, history, or an interesting biography. Books are part of the reason you have the intellect and personality we have come to know, admire, and love as Roger Ebert. But please don’t throw the internet and twitter out with the bath water.

Nice read...finished it rather than my usual skim. Look to history for what generations have given up that their fore-fathers valued. Its not a bad thing.

Am I the only serious reader, a person who can get through hundreds of pages in a day, who simply cannot stand Dickens? (Answer: no. Nor could a couple of my teachers from high school.) I do like A Tale of Two Cities, though, and break it out every few years to swoon over Sidney Carton again.

So anyway.

I like Facebook as a tool. I have recently gotten in touch with a friend and coworker from college. He was the entertainment editor on the Cooper Point Journal, the erratic paper of record for The Evergreen State College. I still know what he thought about a couple of movies; in fact, I wanted to tell him how much I still appreciated what he'd had to say about Shrek. (Speaking of things everyone else likes.) If we keep up contact, I'll give him my e-mail address, and the conversation will move away from Facebook. Several of my friends from many, many years ago and I have reestablished contact and are delighting at sharing what's happened in the last fifteen years.

But I don't think most people care what most other people are thinking and doing all the time. When I'm on Facebook, which is very seldom, the "status" some of my friends have is just silly. It's nice to keep track of a friend's pregnancy, but I don't need to know that it's a nice day in Pasadena, California, and fifteen people "like" that fact. Isn't talking about the weather a sign that we don't have anything better to talk about?

Whether our attention spans are shorter or not, I cannot say; I don't read as many books of late, but I have read literally hundreds of pages of TV Tropes, including spotting references to a couple of people I know. What I can say is that we have less of a filter. We are having our "inside the head" voice programmed out of us by websites which want us to share everything all the time. Well, no thanks. I have two bulletin boards I post on. I have my daily movie reviews. (Today is Clay Pigeons, and I happened on this journal entry while popping by to see what you'd said about it.) I love instant messenger, because I have real-time conversations with a friend 2000 miles or better away and another who's far closer but still long distance. But even there, I have things I don't say. They don't need a minute-by-minute update of the inside of my head. That's scary. No one wants that.

I'm not a huge gamer, and I would consider myself someone who can't play a game which I don't consider "art", or at least enjoy it thoroughly (as opposed to something that'll pass the time). I think these two facts about myself are interrelated, since while it is possible for a game to be "art", the way the gaming industry is set up nowadays does not encourage the creation of such games. There was a good Cracked.com article about this:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html

I know many, many people have probably recommended games to you that they consider "art", but I'd like to chime in too. Try the 2000 PC game "Deus Ex". Thematically/stylistically it is of the philosophical cyberpunk trend, similar in style to "Blade Runner" and "Ghost in the Shell" particularly. It takes heaps of literary and philosophical influences (it has books lying around, when you click them it has some quote from a work of literature which relates to the situation your character is currently in) and in my view has one of the greatest and most engrossing stories ever put into a game. Great music and open gameplay as well.

Mr. Ebert,

Yet again, another intellectual, thought-provoking, collar-pulling, article on the dangerous effects of the internet.

Now I fully appreciate my English teacher who assigns my class a monthly book report. However, while I read my book, most of my classmates and buddies tend to use sparknotes.com as a reliable source. Am I now grateful that I chose to read my book? To Hell I am.

Perhaps the effects also explain how most kids my age listen to music which involves using technology to those who cannot sing and subjects that can never be related to.

But yet again, the internet has befallen many things, such as the movie, video game, music, and television industries due to illegal piracy.

Who knows?

I'm not a huge gamer, and I would consider myself someone who can't play a game which I don't consider "art", or at least enjoy it thoroughly (as opposed to something that'll pass the time). I think these two facts about myself are interrelated, since while it is possible for a game to be "art", the way the gaming industry is set up nowadays does not encourage the creation of such games. There was a good Cracked.com article about this:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html

I know many, many people have probably recommended games to you that they consider "art", but I'd like to chime in too. Try the 2000 PC game "Deus Ex". Thematically/stylistically it is of the philosophical cyberpunk trend, similar in style to "Blade Runner" and "Ghost in the Shell" particularly. It takes heaps of literary and philosophical influences (it has books lying around, when you click them it has some quote from a work of literature which relates to the situation your character is currently in) and in my view has one of the greatest and most engrossing stories ever put into a game. Great music and open gameplay as well.

I got sick of Facebook a few days ago and started a book instead: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. Fantastic book for whenever you finish your Dickens.

"Two year old boy smoking forty cigarettes every day."...news item

In the ocean of the internet, we will never be short of man-bitten dogs.

Hiiiiiiyaaaaaa Marie! I don't know why, I can't correspond with you without smiling, whatever my state of mind. I clicked around on that link, it didn't seem to be working for some reason..

As for twittery, what can I say? I'm not about to ask you to do something Roger advises you against, besides you seem to have a better and more focused platform anyhow, so I guess it's all good in the Ebert-hood.

Also, that limiter on twitter drives me nuts!

A British friend recently e-mailed me the names of three films which were broadcast by the BBC all within two days – 1.Nosferatu the Vampyre. 2. Fitzcarraldo & 3. The Visitor. Bear in mind this is national terrestrial television, so it is pretty impressive stuff, now if North America started doing stuff like this instead of turning people into vegged out American Idol fans, we'd have a lot more people like yourself and Tom and many others here and far less nonsense like Transformers and the showbiz drivel Rog pointed out.

Anyhow, it's pretty special speaking with you after absolutely ages. Happy spelunking (word Robert Downey jr. dislikes most apparently, from that Lipton show).

In the words of Napoleon Dynamite (don't ask..only one of many a stoned viewing adventure, that guy & his llama are indelibly stuck in my head) – k'bye.

Roger said: “It would be like asking a champion mile runner to do the distance heel-to-toe.”

See Tom, this is what you've reduced me to..now I know I'm no champion mile runner, but I sure am a waddling duck over at the place of twittery, can barely manage even heel-to-toe..hope you're happy you cruel, cruel man. That's right, I called you cruel twice, implying you're inflicting double the amount of cruelty on me, just like those people think they've venerated their spirichewal leader by calling him Sri Sri..see you back in the twitverse, that's the sound of a head (mine) popping back in..to the twittery twiddly twaddly place.

Indian Idiot (H.W.)

P.S. What the hell sort of a name is “Biz Stone” anyway? I found out he's the one responsible for that blue birded Bluebeard of articulation [draws a rectangle & calls it a square like in Pulp Fiction].

I'm an odd case, I think.

I read for work for a long time. And for graduate school before that. Reading for pleasure just didn't seem to fit somehow, and it was a habit I got out of, sadly. When I tried, I kept reaching for pens and notepads to underline and take notes.

Also there's the issue of my oddly bland taste in literature. I can really only read genre fiction, and genre fiction, being so predictable and bland, tends to bore me unless it's written with incredible skill. The result is there isn't much I can read. Most things that are really good, I lack the patience for. Most standard genre fiction is just too boring.

Quite the paradox, eh?

And now, it's real life, not the Internet, that has my brain frazzled and unable to focus, so my reading has suffered from THAT. So once again, I find myself too-often book-less.

I've gone back, though. I've gone back to the king of detective genre fiction, Raymond Chandler. Soon I think I'll go back to Thomas Malory, the originator of fantasy genre fiction. And perhaps to Tolkein, but I have to admit that in terms of pleasure I prefer Malory to Tolkein. Both have depth, but Malory offers more of the immediate gratification that I feel the fantasy genre needs to work.

I do have to point out, and I'm sorry if others have beaten me to pointing this out (I didn't read the 130+ comments made before I started writing), but there isn't much about the actual impact of the Internet said in your piece that wasn't attributed to television 20 years ago. (I refer to shorter attention spans, lowering the level of political discourse, etc. None of that is particularly new.)

Personally, I'm inclined to see both television and the Internet as symptoms, not causes.

What I find disturbing are the trends, the downward direction of the spiral. Not television, not the Internet, but the trend itself is what has me worried. Searching for the cause seems somehow fruitless, as the (all-too-rare) cure seems to simply be engagement of the brain.

I've rambled quite enough on a blog that isn't mine.

Nice piece, as pretty much always.

-Nighthawk

Despite the trend in “modern” movies, my heroes are Audie Murphy types who do not go gently into that dark night. My heroes die in the saddle Eril Flynn style, firing until they run out of ammo, while wearing well-polished boots. And so forth. The point is that Roger is making the rather dubious assumption that if he had his brain scanned, his scan would be similar to those people he mentioned in his article. Poppycock! The average person doesn’t spend his life as actively engaged as Roger does. Although he refuses to have a PC along with his Mac, he is still comparatively “hip” for someone of his advanced age. Myself, I have no idea what a Blackberry is and I don’t know Twitter, nor do I. . . ohh, I’ve forgotten whatever the names of those thigamabobes are. However, the point remains that Roger is an “abnormal” person, and would therefore undoubtedly have a brain scan similar to that unfortunate chap in Young Frankenstein, Abbie Normal.

How many people live their lives so actively engaged in what they do as he has his? Here is a fellow who not only has a conversation with someone but also makes a drawing of the person as well. When most “normal” people would have retired and gone into a semi-vegetative state in front of the telie, this lunatic is still writing reviews, Twittering and tinkering with God only knows what other new fangled gadgets and what not.

He gets hit with one knockout blow after another and yet he still keeps getting back on his feet to take whatever comes next. Who does this sort of thing? Who in heaven’s name spends his time simultaneously managing a first rate site and writing two or three blog entries a week, all the while traipsing around the globe, when any “rational” person would be waiting for the onset of senility? On top of all this, he is writing memoires and what have you. My God, it’s downright inspiring.

Ebert: (1) If anyone can find that painting, Marie Haws will...

Hmm...

"In his book on poetry published in 1730, the German critic Johann Christoph Gottsched describes a French painting showing a dead abbot lying in a meadow: 'The artist, obeying I know not what unseemly custom, stuck a lily into the body's bare bottom.'

Visual pun , French painting, no later than 1730, features a dead Abbot with a flower in his bum.

That sounds like the sort of shenanigans monks used to get up to when painting Illuminated Manuscripts - uber sneaky subtext. :)

As likely the Church wouldn't have allowed the painting to be shown, I'm thinking. Not the bare bottom of a priest. Too risque.

Whereas the Dutch were different - Hieronymus Bosch; enough said, eh? He was totally into freaky stuff.

I'll have to take a look and see what I find. But again, I'm thinking it's something he noticed in a bit of religious art.

Meanwhile, I have to finish painting this Kabuki thing for a friend; don't ask. Chuckle!

Ah, the internet. Blessing or curse?

As amazing as it is, I have difficulty at times seeing the benefits of it. I did experience the frisson, as you describe it. And I think it made me somewhat addicted.

My theory is that people who love to read are much more prone to getting hooked on the internet. There's so much there to read. And the wide-ranging curiosity a voracious reader tends to have can make us very helpless in the face of so much that's novel and seemingly important.

Before the internet had me in its clutches, I used to have a similar helpless feeling about the irresistibility of reading fiction and the newspaper, when I had to work. That itch to go down and buy the NYT when I had something due wasn't that dissimilar to the itch I have to check out Twitter. What if something happens and I don't know about it instantly?!

There's such a great benefit to staying off the internet. But, as you point out, there's so much great writing. I think I'm learning from your tweets. It's fun. I love the people you've introduced me to, such as Natasha Bandwar. I am always learning from you and these other people.

To avoid being overly compelled by the internet, I have to take longish breaks from it. I can't give it up entirely. But if I do want to rediscover reading and the like, it's the only thing that works.

I think I might have the brain pan of a stagecoach tilter.

Thirty seconds into that video I looked at the playback bar and thought, "Man, this thing is 2:46 long?" My brain has betrayed me =(.

I would slightly rejig the cause/effect relationship being proposed here. I believe that the human brain naturally prefers short bursts of information to process, and that the Internet, by virtue of providing precisely this kind of information, only allows us to lapse back into a comfortable and natural state. Hence, the rapidity with which the Internet appears to rewire brains.

Books, on the other hand, force us to do something quite unnatural, ie- to push our minds into an abstract world of thoughts which are by turns detailed, elongated, and thorough. There is no conceivable reason why our evolutionary ancestors on the African savannah would have needed such a skill; it seems obvious that this is a modern trait of the literate age, and apparently a fragile one, hence the rapid rearrangement of web surfers' brain patterns. The ability to rapidly process quick bits of information seems much more immediately useful to a caveman than the ability to process detailed abstract ideas.

Of course, a creationist would no doubt disagree, for the simple reason that he doesn't believe we have evolutionary ancestors at all. But then again, a creationist is unlikely to read books about how the theory of evolution works, because he will prefer the concept distilled into short sound-bites, packaged, spin-doctored, and presented to him in a form which suits his prejudices ... something the Internet does magnificently.

I love the fact that lot of your posts and the comments morph into book title trading sessions. I have benefited greatly from your reviews (and your gentle nudges to read a particular book - you led me to "A Fan's Notes" and many more titles)to kick start my reading habit.

I would like to repay my debt in part. I have a suggestion for you, Roger- "One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka. Reading the book is like experiencing zero gravity - you feel light, engulfed by vacuum and space.

Also, I guess the immersive aspect of books (spending a few hours in a different universe observing, taking-in and contemplating without jockeying with the joy stick) pushes us into a more pleasant place in the space-time fabric.

Ebert: Of course you have to take into account that I'm at home more than most people.

I always knew I was unique (everyone is, after all), but I seem to be a rare species indeed.

I have been online since the days when my 1200 BAUD modem connected to MSU via ARCHIE. I have since been through nearly every iteration of online access there is, from faster and faster modems, to bonded modems (multi-line), through ISDN and DSL, to cable.

I bought my first domain in 1994. I had several by 1997, two of which I still own to this day. I was online early and often, and frequented BBS's and forums around the world. I watched the WWW take shape and was an early adopter of Mosaic, the graphical browser credited with opening the Web to "normal" folk. (Roger will like that. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992!)

I telecommute and have done so for most of the past 14 years. For the past four years I have provided 2nd level support for our customers who are scattered from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to San Diego. This is done via remote access connections over the Internet, and means that I am online and connected a minimum of 60-80hrs a week. To facilitate this my home office has redundant high-speed broadband connections that, combined, exceed 80Mb/downstream & 15Mb upstream.

I am not just online, I live and breathe it. I am on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. I have roughly 15 active email accounts spanning several domains, including web accounts with Google, Yahoo & Windows Live Hotmail (which was HoTMaiL when I signed up for the first public Beta in 1996). I subscribe to the NY Times, the LA Times and the Sacramento Bee online. I have accounts with CBS Sports, ESPN and The Sporting News. My political activism is alive online: I sign petitions, I contribute to causes, I arrange to host or visit gatherings of similarly active people. I read blogs and newsletters and Salon and The Guardian and much, much more.

Why do I describe my admittedly rare (and all-too-geeky) online history?

Because long before any of that existed, I read books and watched movies...and I continue doing both today with undiminished enthusiasm.

I started reading at the age of three, read my first science fiction novel (Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel") at the age of six, and have been unable (and unwilling) to stop ever since. I read an average of 2-3 books a week, sometimes considerably more, and when I pick one up it requires an Act of God (or my wife and/or children) to force me to put it down.

Example: A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of "The Caves of Steel" by Isaac Asimov, which, chronologically, is the first novel in his future history of Foundation & Empire. I finished it in a few hours and didn't want to stop, so I went to Amazon and ordered the other 12 books in the series (three of which had to come from another source, as the "Empire" novels are no longer in print). Within a few days (during which I read "sleepless" by Charlie Huston and "When the Mirror Crack'd" by Agatha Christie) I had received the rest of Asimov's wonderful gift to readers.

I read all 12 books in 10 days. It would have been much less, but work stole a couple of those days via some 12hr sessions spent wrangling with recalcitrant computers and their users.

I have to be careful when picking up a book. What time is it? How long will this book take to devour? How much sleep do I need? I must consider those and many minor possible distractions before I turn to Page One, for in all likelihood that is my last moment to choose; afterward I am trapped, and wonderfully so, until the final page is turned and the author deigns to release me from his or her spell.

Don't get me wrong, for frissons are wonderful. I love a good frisson, especially the unexpected ones that sneak up on me during an otherwise humdrum day. But frissons are but the colorful feathers on a bird, the real meat lies beneath.

I need the entire experience. I want the rise and fall of expectations, the fluctuating intensity, the interplay of emotions that great writers weave for me to enjoy. A frisson is like an orgasm that results from a "quickie". It is still pleasurable, still wonderful, and sometimes it is all I require.

But the vast majority of the time I want the entire love affair: from beginning to end, from the "meet and greet" through the "getting to know each other"; from the sweet anticipation through the mental foreplay, finally culminating in the kind intellectual stimulation that only happens when you commit your own heart and soul to the process.

The best books and films still do that to me, more than 1/2 century after I discovered them.

Ahh, but it is late and I dare not pick up a book or start a movie; I must be fresh to start the new week.

So much for another love affair tonight.

Frisson, anyone?

Ebert: A comment from a happy man.

I started with 300 baud on a Model 100. It was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen.

"We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us."
Marshall McLuhan

It is a very strange coincidence to read your tweet and blog this evening. Yesterday, I read this quote while reading "Marshall McLuhan" by Douglas Coupland and I've been thinking about it all day.

Coupland's creative interpretation of a biography is a unique perspective on the enigmatic man and the current impact of technology in today's society.

As a former graphic designer and current artist and educator, this book has given me many "frisson" moments. It may alter the way you produce, analyze and consume media and information ... I highly recommend this book. It has been a pleasure to read.

It's been pretty fascinating to see your evolution as a Twit, Roger. From being anti-Twitter to tweeting choice responses from here to being so prolific that more than a few of my friends have unsubscribed to updates from your feed for fear of their phones blowing up. Your habit evolved at lightspeed, though you are thankfully a good, interesting read at 140 characters or otherwise: No inconsequential blather about how your night managing the Pizza Hut went or how many zombies you capped playing some X-Box game.

Wi-fi is the addiction of our times. I went mostly without during Ebertfest, and it nearly killed me. I tweeted via cellphone and racked up a massive bill, saw crazily increased traffic to my blog, but ultimately failed to sustain anything because I couldn't get my fix. I figured that I would just write up my experience when I got back to my dorm room, but the minute I was back at school, I went back to the daily routine of refreshing the hell out of Twitter and my e-mail account, neither of which are updated enough to warrant significant attention. I pushed the writing off until I was done with my final project, finished my final project, and found that I had more time to waste on Twitter and e-mail and everything else. I vowed to write after I'd packed up the contents of my dorm room, then created a sad little list of books to read and movies to watch simply from the stack of unread, unwatched things that were in my room more for decoration than utility. Summer vacation would be my chance, I said, head hanging sadly over the copy of Bergman's Persona that I'd gotten from Netflix back in December.

It's May, and I just finished my first non-required novel (thankfully, required reading this year included Shakespeare, Kerouac, and Ginsberg) of the year, Didion's Play it As it Lays, because I was on a plane to San Francisco and didn't particularly find the $12 fee for a few hours of internet at 30,000 feet to be worth it. Then I found myself knee deep in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which I have mostly been unable to put down. Hopefully reading daily will become a habit again, the good news being that reading is like riding a bike--the skill never really goes away and is actually a joy to rediscover.

Interesting, as always. As a writer of novels for teens, I can say that teenagers still read books. And I'm constantly surprised and delighted at the well-written e-mails and letters I receive from readers. I hear from most of them via the internet, so they're obviously web-literate as well as literary-literate. Wonder if their neural pathways, because they've never known a world without the internet, would look different on a brain scan than the scans of adults who grew up before the internet was around.

Boy, do I know what you're talking about. I was turned on to Dickens a few years ago through you, and made my way through several novels, proclaiming him my favorite author. I got my mother, who never reads novels, to read "David Copperfield" and she adored it. I set Dickens aside months ago for a Shakespeare intermission. I labeled this year "My Shakespeare World Tour" because I had planned to travel to many places, reading every Shakespeare play along the way. It started off very well, back home in Albuquerque. I had all the time in the world, to sit at Starbucks and read "Two Gentlemen of Verona", all four parts of "Henry VI", "Romeo and Juliet", "A Midsummer Nights Dream", "Titus Andronicus", and more, over a venti Earl Grey tea with milk. I never have to ask for drinks at Starbucks. The cashiers just hit their heads and yell "Wait!" to the barista on days when I change my rhythm. Shakespeare had been my enemy in high school, and we made up really nicely and became best friends. He understood me. I finally understood him. I hardly even had to glance at the opposite page dictionary entries. I had very poetic things to say when I spoke to friends on the phone. I ordered ten Shakespeare plays to take with me to Riyadh, and they're all sitting in a box in my closet here. I've taken a couple to the cafe here. I have to keep starting back at the beginning. I teach, I'm stressed out, and I just can't find the patience to sit down and give Shakespeare my attention. I thought that if I read some light Roald Dahl, it would ease me back into reading. Dahl is a treasure in his own way. But my Shakespeare World Tour has been shot to hell. All I want to do when I get home from work is sit down and watch episodes of "Roseanne" on dvd. To my credit, her show is closer in value to Shakespeare than all the other current trash is to her show.

"Sumptuous paramours of elusory cinema and felicitously bereft of subfuscous antediluvian cerebra cudgeled by phthisis." (H.W.)

Let that be a lesson to you emotionally-distant artists in the advanced stages of tuberculosis or other similar diseases.

Is it possible that we simply were not prepared for the internet? How do you prepare a culture for something with probably more stimuli in one place than we've ever seen before? Are we, as human beings, naturally inclined to take the easy way of things if it's offered us?

Roger, your subjects are always interesting. I recall having “Read Dickens!” on my New Year’s Resolutions list immediately following “Lose 10 lbs!” for years. It wasn’t that I didn’t care to read; I did (still do) and voraciously. It was Dickens, in particular, I avoided. I attended, from preschool to senior graduation, one of the tiniest prep schools in existence. The student body was small as was the teaching staff so I “enjoyed” one fire-breathing dragon of an English teacher from 5th through 8th grade. Her peculiar bullying style (stand and recite the prepositions or receive a zero for the day) was effective for English grammar but hit a snag for me when it came to literature. So, I considered Great Expectations an affront and held Dickens personally responsible for the assault. His placement on my ambitious, yet largely ineffective, “should do” list began during my college years.

I must have been in my thirties when I found myself stuck on an airplane with nothing to do for hours. Naturally, I had placed a copy of David Copperfield in my purse just in case – carried that darned book around with me for years – and I was forced to take a peek. After that, there was nothing else to be done but read everything the man penned, including the dreaded Great Expectations. The following Christmas, I chose to send cards with a Dickens theme as a celebratory gesture.

Now, if I could just get what Twitter is all about...and lose those 10 lbs.

Roger,
Your insightful writing has been a joy to read, and although I can no longer remember how I found you on Twitter, I am glad that I did. I was interested to read @chemo_girl's comment, as while I was reading your blog and the other comments, I was thinking to myself about my experiences over the last two years. Having had five very serious surgeries in five months and spending 72 days in hospital at the beginning of 2008, I went from a person who read all the time to one who couldn't stay with a book for five pages. Nor a magazine. Friends brought movies on DVD's but I could not bear to watch them, one-hour TV shows were too hard to focus on. About the best I could do was to watch re-runs of old half-hour sitcoms and get a bit of light humour from that. But even that felt like hard work. Holding a book was exhausting and as the surgeries were abdominal, there was nowhere comfortable to prop anything. Even after the many months of recovery, I find that I still don't read in the same way that I used to do, and that I get a great deal of amusement, enjoyment and distraction from the web/Twitter and surfing online. I do find reading news articles online to be less tiring than holding a newspaper has become, and carrying an iPad with me less exhausting than carrying books and magazines, so in my mind, I have justified moving so much of my life to online/digital sources to be a coping mechanism. After reading your blog, I think that there is a chance that my brain has been re-wired by this, but it feels like a chicken versus egg argument, as I think the original re-wiring was probably done by all of the drugs and effects of surgery and illness. But the question for me is "Does it make the experience of life less?" I am not sure that it does, from a partially Buddhist viewpoint, I think it is neither better nor worse as a result.
Hoping to read much more of you in print on bound pages but more comfortably on the web.
Kind regards,
Sharon

Perhaps there's no end to my naievety but I experienced shock - frisson of a most negative sort on a recent visit to my local library.
(n. 1. A place in which literary and artistic materials, such as books, periodicals, newspapers, are kept for reading, reference,or lending!)In a section I don't normally frequent I noticed a growing section of a new genre called "Graphic Fiction." That this genre is legitimized by shelf space in my library is incomprehensible to me!

I can't believe no one's said it yet. Roger, you--and thousands like you--are Twitterpated.

Seriously, though...Twitter in its own way looks inward as much as Facebook and all the other social networking sites. "Here is what I find of interest, and I will share it with you, my devoted followers." Yes, many of your "tweets" are interesting, but they tend to divert me from the important things in my life. I need to spend most of my time doing my job, caring for my family, cleaning the house, doing the shopping, weeding the garden, and when I have time to relax the last thing I want to do is jolt my brain some more. I'd rather curl up with a book or watch a movie. I just saw Vertigo again and realized I appreciate it more each time I watch. The classic movies of previous generations moved much more slowly than most films do today. They had texture.

I used to spend a lot of time on the computer, "chatting" with people, bloggin daily and avidly perusing the Web. Then I got a full-time job. I feel as if I'm better off.

Enjoy yourself, but remember to take time for the texture in life.

Roger,

At the risk of sounding unhip for not having a more obscure choice, you've been my favourite writer for many-a-year. There's barely an article or blog post of yours that I don't read. Even when I disagree with the points you make, I find a way of communicating ideas and feelings from your musings that I can't get anywhere. You've provided much influence on how I write, and how I look at life.

That said, every time you have spoken about video games in any capacity, I have found myself strangely angry. Upset. At times, smoldering with nerd-rage. I've blathered many knee-jerk reactionary rants, and I don't look back fondly on them.

What made me angry wasn't simply the argument you were making, but the bizarre lack of research or common sense you apply to seemingly everything else you've ever written.
It felt uncharacteristic, like you were betraying your own standards. It would be as bad as Bob Chipman declaring movies devoid of artistic merit, simply because the majority of movies on Planet Earth are porn and security surveillance tapes.

And now, here we are once again, opening that wound... And for once, you have a strong point to make. This is the first recorded instance I've seen of you, video games and a rational thought being in the same room. At last you've come to the real problem holding video games back:

The problem isn't the games, or the bad movies(Revenge of the Fallen), or the terrible literature(Twilight). The problem is that not enough of us demand any better.

You are right to posit that we are in an age obsessed with quick, simple incentives. The fast and easy road. Anything else looks like work. Everyone is in too much of a damn hurry, we have too many distractions. So video games give us power ups, and little bad guys to stomp, and explosions. There is never room for quiet pacing, there is only noise. Dialogue, which could open characters up for the world to see is reduced to grunts and yelling in 5-second long bite-sized chunks.

Otherwise, people start to get nervous. Game developers are afraid that we will lose interest. That if they don't include some insipid means of timed button presses then it ceases to be a video game. This attitude, this search for the "fissons" is what holds back many games from being art, and also what holds back a lot of us from being exposed to the finer arts.

You can't do a game about dinnertime conversation in the victorian countryside, because that's "boring". You can't make a video game without guns or lasers or magic spells, because that's "gay". The problem was never video games.

It's us. It's not that games aren't or cannot be art, it's that we're not letting them. By constantly demanding that this cycle of brazen virtual pornography never change, to never improve, to never be about more than having the shiniest graphics or the bloodiest content, we have only ourselves to blame when 1 out of every 2 games is about nothing more than the wanton slaughter of aliens. Maybe if we were willing to commit to anything, and stop settling for quick, meaningless Pavlovian rewards, we'd be reading better books, seeing better movies, playing better games and living richer lives.

Films are lucky. At least they had a chance to be noticed before Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Livejournal starting competing for our attention. We could all stand to read more, to go outside more often, to talk to one another in person more. To enrich ourselves.

These things, Video Games included, were always big. It's the people who got small.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Roger, wouldn't you say that our brains having this capability suggests that we evolved in an environment that sometimes had things coming at us so thick and fast that we needed to be able to rewire our thought processes because we couldn't afford to think deeply? Scary to think of a world where giving something serious thought could/would get you killed.

(For all you intelligent design fans out there, I suppose this mental capability shows that God foresaw twitter and facebook and all the rest in our future, and made sure we'd be prepared for it...)

Well, you convinced me with twitter. I made an account a long time ago but I didn't quite get into it. I guess I'll have to approach it differently, because it looks like an interesting tool.

Hey Roger, just thought you'd be interested in the frisson I had with your article about frisson.

I was reading a video game review on another site which mentioned the word frisson. I'd never come across it before and wondered what it meant. After I finished reading that page I closed the tab. The next one open was of course yours, complete with a full description of the word.

So it looks like it can happen when you're surfing the web after all :)

I'm always checking out books from the "classics" section of the library. It's probably some snob thing of mine; "my sister may read those trashy teen novels, but I, sir, have loftier books in mind! Now, if you'll excuse me, I need my tea before I begin to deconstruct a Hugh Grant movie!"

The problem is that I never finish any of them. Some I don't even start; I checked out a collection of O. Henry short stories, and returned it without ever even opening the cover. Some, I can get a ways into; I got to page 71 of Thackeray's 730-odd page "Vanity Fair," before school consumed me. A rare few, I can even get close to the end; "Huckleberry Finn" is almost finished, but I simply never remember to pick it up and read it. Sadly (or not, depending on your view), I think the most recent books I've read cover-to-cover are books by Scott McCloud, "Reinventing Comics" and "Zot!"

I've wondered if maybe my attention span is shorter than I may be--SQUIRREL!--aware of. The Internet does seem to have that effect; if you're bored with something, you can quickly go off to another thing. Godard said that his generation was "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola;" I often think that mine is made of the children of MTV and New Coke, though it may be getting closer to say MySpace and Monster Energy Drinks.

Twitter is something that I rarely use. Say what you will about Facebook, but it's fun for people like me to be able to read about what my friends are doing without having to go and ask them. Best of all, there's a higher limit to text, so you can actually put a little more thought into what you say on there. Twitter seems to be ADD in phone and Web form.

As for video games, as I've said before, video games are like movies in that the great majority aren't meant to be art, but entertainment, produced to make money rather than to move an audience. I'm not going to play a game like "Painkiller" (which is all about killing demons) to think about the afterlife and what it will be like; I'm going to play it because it's fun, switch-your-mind-off entertainment. Still, there's some good stuff out among the junk food; I think that something like "Today I Die" could show you that video games at least have the potential to be art. Best of all, it's short and it plays in any browser with Flash, so you don't need any more equipment than a Mac and a mouse. Just like in film, the really interesting artistic stuff tends to be made by the scrappy independents, not the big guys with their eyes on the bottom line.

It's funny you mentioned Dombey and Son: I've had a copy for a long time--decades, fer chrissakes--and I decided this year to finally read it. One chapter in five months. Oh, the shame.

By the way, if you're hunting around for the Great American Novel No One Knows, try Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, about his experiences "on the fritz" during the Depression. It's an episodic descent into Hell--but it changed my life in college, Elevated me as a story of survival. It's also beautifully written, in a style that not merely appropriates Hemingway but perfects it. You will never read such perfect strings of short, declarative sentences of calm horror and honest confession. This was his only novel, and he gives it everything; you can tell because by the end there's nothing left.

I've been meaning to read The Brothers Karamazov for awhile now. It's one of those books you feel terribly embarrassed for having never read. The tragedy is I'm living in Taiwan and I'm nearly broke, and as such I can't afford to have English language books or anything else that costs a respectable sum of money shipped here. Nor can I really get much from the local library; understandably, there are very few decent libraries for English speakers in the middle of a Chinese speaking country.

As such, for me, the Internet has been my savior. The entire book is available online at Project Gutenberg, alongside innumerable other books with expired copyrights. So long as I'm content to read books that are old, I have a nearly endless supply of books to read.

But the Internet is also my curse. I'll read a few pages and then check my E-mail. Then I'll read a few pages and check a forum I regularly visit. Then I'll read a few pages and do a search on Wikipedia on something that's on my mind. In other words, I seem to be having great difficulty setting aside frisson and just reading the book.

...

Which explains why I currently have the tab open to the book right now and yet I'm posting a long message on your blog about how I can't sit down and read the book. Grrr!

P.S. No relation to Ivan Karamazov.

Remember blogging about your home library being disorganized? This March I moved into a new house and decided I would use the Library Of Congress Catalog number, found in the front of many books near the ISBN number on the copyright page, to organize my 5000 plus books. I printed off two copies of the ten page primary and secondary LCC classification headings, had a meeting with my wife before we opened any of the packed books, and planned where everything was going on the new wall to wall shelves of The Study. Not as easy as it sounds. Once you decide you will no longer double stack shelves, your esitmates of how much shelf space you need soon fall short of the goal of containing the coolection in one room. I actually have a two room collection, but not another room, so I now have "special collections" distributed around the house, but these at least continue to follow the LCC system. (Could have selected another system but LCC is on the copyright page.)

Downloaded the Works of Thoreau for my PC from Kindle, but I prefer holding the book in my hands. I try to imagine Thoreau with WIFI in his Walden cabin, blogging instead of journaling, but the purpose of journaling and being at Walden was to be Off The Grid.

...Yet, I'm planning on building a replica of Thoreau's cabin in the woods near my house, as now I also live on a lake, and being still somewhat of a Buddhist, it's time I finally began my three year retreat, even if it will only be occasssional. I will probably blog the three year experiment, but I will also keep a handwritten journal of my experiments in tranquility.

In reading the newest Thoreau publications, I learned that he was writing Charles Darwin toward the end of his life. Somehow I like to think a new school was forming in Ameerican literature: the Evolutionary Transcendentalists.

Oliver: I have had the same experience. Before my mind-meld with the internet (1996) I would be working on 4-5 books per month and finish most of them before I started rotating new ones into the mix. Now there are dozens of books I have started, lost track of, and eventually given away or sold due to lack of interest. Only on vacation do I find myself finishing a book. I really enjoy the internet with its arguments, snarky comments, and links leading to links. However, I think I am much more proud of the books I have finished than the one liners I have zinged people with on message boards or in chat rooms. I wonder what a good percentage would be for spare time entertainment/enlightenment...25% books, 25% internet, 25% movies, 15% TV, 10% games?

Kyu: I agree with you regarding TV. Deadwood, Battlestar, The Wire, Six Feet Under and many more shows are often better than the majority of movies produced - these are shows that can be consumed as long films if you have the time. I think the main difference compared to older TV shows is the merging of soap opera (long running character and story arcs) with primetime TV (better production values and actors).

Roger, re the frisson piece and disconnecting and connecting and all destinations
in between:

I do not own a computer, never have and never will. I hate machines. I hate computers.
So how am I online now, neo-Luddite caveman in a cave in southern Taiwan with no land line,
no iPhone or iPod (sorry, I don't do earplugs, hate em!), no car, just me and my paperbound
notebooks and a pen to write on? I rent, Roger.

Every morning, around 10 am, i ride my bicycle four blocks
to a local Internet cafe, where 99 men play computer games all day and all night, and one lone American blogger
puts in a few coins and rents the email machine for 2 hours or so. I've never had a computer in my home ever ever.

I do my email chores and blogging work and surfing (screening, I call it, not reading, reading is only for paper surfaces) for 2 hours and then go out into the world for 12 hours and come back around midnight, for a one-hour check of my emails and blog work. I prefer things this way. I don't want a computer. I don't want
any of these un-needed gadgets. I got my daily print newspapers, my books, my TV news and my local cinema, [where, by the way, Roger,
i think i stumbled onto to something illegal, in Taiwan they have these cinemas called second-run movie theaters where they show
recent Hollywood and Japan movies about 6 months after they open in the main theaters, and the price is just US$1.50 for a double feature of movies
that are just 6 months old, and I have the feeling that these theaters do not pay any fees to Hollywood at all, that it is some kind of illegal underground
gangster triad operation, because when i have gone to these double features for US$1.50 what I notice is the quality of the prints are inferior, way inferior,
and sometimes it looks like the film unwinding in the projection room is a pirated copy, not the real Hollywood print, so the studios that made the films
are not getting anything for this. Could this true. I asked one of the theater clerks and they told me not to ask any more questions
or i could likely end up losing some of my fingers to gangster triads, so I am not pressing the issue anymore. But thought I'd tell you here. Smile.]

PS: William Powers has a good book coming out soon Hamlet's BlackBerry, from his 75 page essay a few years back, now a full book, from HarperCollins one word, and in it he talks about the need to disconnect, in this oh so connected world, and he even speaks of a destination called "Disconnect" like an airport destination ticket, he calls it DCT for "disconnect" and read this book for the summer, Roger. It's going to be the book of the year. And it will get attacked as well. Sigh.

I have been through phases with the internet where I could hardly stand to be away from it - college encouraged this sort of behavior, for example. During these kind of phases going any extended period of time without checking on my email/messageboards/blogs made me distinctly nervous. Things are happening! And I'm not there to see them! If I check tomorrow it might be too late! And - horror of horrors - I will MISS OUT on something!

I have a more relaxed attitude about it these days. I sort of liken it to a relationship - you go through that crazy phase where you want to be with it every single minute, and eventually you get to the phase where you're more confident that it will still be there when you get back. The novelty wears off and I realized that yes, there are some awesome things on the internet, but a lot of time time spent looking for those awesome things is better spent going for a walk. Once I re-balanced my time somewhat I went back to my usual voracious reading habits. That's something I can't stay away from for long! So now I check a few choice places, like your blog, that will be for certain a valuable use of time. After this, this morning, I'm spending my day off out in the park with my copy of Infinite Jest. Now that's frission.

(I worry a bit more about the kids growing up with this sort of technology, the texting and the hand-held internet and what that does to THEIR attention spans. But everyone fretted about my generation growing up with TV and what THAT would do to our attention span, and we came out.. well, we're not.. um.. hmm.)

That UCLA study was flawed. The Internet does not rewrite our brains. Period. That was sloppy academic bs and sloppy journalism. Everyone has something to sell. Our brains are not for sale. The Net does not re-wire our brains. Flawed study. You want the truth: read Anne Mangen from Norway on materiality and screen-reading. That's where the truth lies. UCLA is mere PR media feed. Read between the lines. Even Nick Carr got scammed on that one. Sigh.

All people like being read to. It's the true calming and personal gift.

Sometimes I feel suffocated by the small world of the twitter. It's good to communicate with others I know in real-time, it's fun to say something in a limited form, but it's too small for what I want. And I have other serious matters in my real life to be taken care of.

I recently have the problems with getting started again. I find it's hard to focus on the papers while trying to search for something useful for me. In contrast, it was quite easy for me to focus on many thick textbooks for hours without any difficulty during undergraduate years.

The difference is, I did not own the laptop at that time. Although I had a computer in my dorm room, I did not have much time to use Internet. During weekdays, I used it only during a brief time after the supper or at the end of the day. Nowadays, my laptop occupies a big place in my daily life. Whenever the day starts, I check two e-mails account, my two blogs, your blog(and comments), and, this is the latest addition, your twitter site.

I have been bothered by my seemingly deficient long-term memory I've never experienced before. Sometimes I asked myself why I could not remember the shots from the movies as well as before. The movies in 2009 are less clearly remembered than the ones in 2003, unless I watched them more than once or they are really good. Maybe the reason is that I watched movies far more than that time, but this pattern is shown up in other parts of my daily life. This is so disturbing to me that I have even wondered whether I had mad cow disease.

The article you introduced suggests that maybe my suspicion about Internet is right(Is it also the cause of Brain Cloud?). Anyway, I begin to change my lifestyle and I am still a good bookworm(but not a good "paperworm" yet). After finishing J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace", I immediately choose another book for my spare time, which is more precious nowadays. (By the way, I came across the phrase "No Country, this, for Old Men" while reading "Disgrace" - When I wrote the review for the movie based on the book months ago, the subtitle for my review was "No Country for This Man")

Internet is inseparable to us now. So it's up to us finding the way for gathering valuable informations we want quickly and fully concentrate on them without idling. Experts have always said about developing that ability since the dawn of Internet. You and others have been good windows to me.

P.S.
There is a silver lining in my troublesome symptom. If the movie is really good or very bad, it prevents my head from getting distracted. The latest example was "Poetry"; my eyes were completely fixed on the screen. That is how I can distinguish good "slow" movies from bad "slow" movies(e.g. "The Limits of Control"). So I'm not a complete basket case at all.

Roger;
As always, your insights are a joy to read. There's no doubt our collective attention span has decreased. Endless cable channels, the internet, soundbite journalism, etc... all conspire to make the population seem shallow.

However, lets consider that in all likelihood these effects are temporary. The mere fact that you're aware of it, and now considering making an effort to be less shallow indicates there's been no significant change in your mind. Just because a neuro-whatever-expert sees different patterns in our brains (especially ones that changed in a few days in the case of the web-newbies in the study) doesn't mean humanity is headed in a wrong direction.

The internet is only 15 years old, a mere blink in the timeline of human history. Surely when the written word came along, some lamented that the beautiful stories passed down verbally from the old to the young would lose their significance. The birth of the phone surely made some long for the charm of letter writing.
Humanity will adapt and advance. The incredible spread of information and access to all of human knowledge that the internet has enabled will help to plant the seeds of an enormously better future for mankind. When new generations grow up in a world with access to exponentially more information than our generation had, there will certainly be differences between us that will seem negative to us but completely natural to those that come after us. Sure, it's possible there will be some shallowness initially, but give it the world some time... We're only at the beginning. Look at what humanity has accomplished with only a small percentage of humans having access to education and technology. If we lift our eyes to the horizon, we can see that these are only the early years of the information age and one hundred years from now things may be very different, but our brains wont be worse, they'll just be different.

In the meantime, the pendulum will swing the other way when some form of e-book replaces the printed page, and give our generation a way to enjoy 'full size' literature. (it's only a matter of time). But you can bet those e-books will have all sorts of ways to interact with what we're reading in ways none of us have yet imagined.

actually, KWJ, above, we have not evolved very much as a species, even with out books and iPads and computers. We are in fact pretty dumb humans still. Very dumb. Let ourselves become hooked on oil and coal, hooked on speed and convenience, hooked on some supernatural hocus pocus the Westerners call God with a Capital G but the Easterners only get to call their gods with a lowercase g as if the Western gods are superior. Not. We are headed for climate chaos, klimatkatostrof the Germans call it, by year 2500 there will only be 200,ooo humans left in north regions in polar cities serving as breeding pairs in the Arctic, as per James Lovelock. Nobody wants to confront this reality. Let gadgets rule our lives. Pure fun. We are doomed, doomed as Pvt Frazier used to say on Dad's Army on BBC. It doesn't matter if we wake up or clean the oil. It's too late. We are damanged goods. 30 more generations is all that there is left. Repent? no, enjoy! every moment. Time has run out.

There's a better way to browse the Web? Yes, read a print newspaper! A snailpaper!

I'm going to start reading after my baccalaureate exams. I want to expand my literary culture as much as my cinematic culture. My Audio-visual teacher at school told me that in order to become a real film director, I should start reading. I'm going to start with The Catcher In the Rye.

Also wanted to comment on some observations i have made on facebook.
As you may or may not know, there's a "likes and interests" category in a user's profile: Movies, books, tv shows, music.
Here's what i find often:
"Favorite Books: ..... YEAH RIGHT!!
or
Favorite Book: Vogue, cosmo :P:P"

Funny and also quite sad.

Beautiful piece Mr Ebert.

Type­stol­gia: (n.) — A nos­tal­gia for old man­ual and elec­tric type­writ­ers as well as the sound of type­writ­ing on such machines. Alt spelling: typestalgia, see "solastalgia" as well.

If you know you have an addictive personality, then it is probably in your best interests to not get into gaming. I've avoided casinos and the like my entire life for this reason. No idea if I'd actually enjoy them, but I'm fine in not finding out.

As for games being art or not, I believe games can have artistic elements, the same as a movie (score, imagery, drama, etc), but not neessarily be a "work of art" in and of itself. (There have been orchestral pieces in games that have been just as moving to me as anything from "regular" modern composers.)

And finally... this article totally gave me a frisson. o_O

Perhaps there are greater frissons and lesser frissons? And maybe we are wired to be indiscrimiate frisson-seekers. And maybe like with any addiction we require ever more to remain satisified. Maybe the big difference is that the internet can keep lesser frissons coming in a seemingly endless supply.

But maybe there is something different about greater frissons -- the kind that one might experience reading a great book, watching a great movie, hearing a great storyteller, or seeing the Grand Canyon (in person, with your own eyes) for the first time. Maybe they don't come around as often, but maybe these frissons have staying power. The "aha" moment is accompanied by the elation of you and your brain realizing "we've never been HERE before, but wouldn't it be nice to tarry a bit? Maybe savor it for awhile, read/see/hear this again?". As for books, how magical is it that scanning sequences of symbols separated by spaces can produce this effect? Even with no illustrations, no hyperlinks, no video clips. Truth from fiction. Lies from facts. All it takes is these symbols and spaces.

And, oh, how difficult to place them in a sequence that leaves behind meaning and the possibility of frissons for someone else.

The internet truly is a marvel, new and unique in human experience in so many ways. Here we are having a global conversation, dinner with Roger. Whether it be about frissons, departed friends, great novels, politics and religion, who got wasted at last night's party (with pix!), whatever. I only remember a precious few of the conversations I've had, but I do remember most of the books, or at least have a memory of the greater frissons I experienced reading them.

Maybe this conversation will be one I do remember, the one that put me back in search of greater frissons.

To sit alone in lamplight, a book spread out before you, +hold intimate converse w/ unseen generations—pleasure beyond compare. ~Kenko/1340

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head. ~Arthur Schopenhauer [1788-1860]

*** You are a human scientist, Roger, a behavioralist, a cause-and-effect thinker of the first degree. I remain delighted to linger in the circle of your conversations.

As a bibliophile who tweets, my brain remains addicted to both. However, as a social scientist and professor, I realize that when I linger longer than prudent on Twitter, it's because, as humans, we all flourish in the delicious rewards of immediate reinforcement: connections, comments, and the ever-golden RE-TWEETS!

Reading a book, well, forces our delights into a solitary form of thinking.

Turns out, as your blog here crystalizes, that we all are addicted to the rewards of feedback and human connection. As much as we can get.

*156,000+ followers* She shakes thick silver locks of hair in bemused amazement.

Dr. SunWolf
who occasionally tweets as @TheSocialBrain and @WabiSabiWhisper

Ebert: It's so encouraging to know the same person can be @TheSocialBrain and @WabiSabiWhisper. We are large, we contain multitudes.

Your questions about video game addiction reminded me of this article by Tom Bissell, formerly one of the best writers for The Believer Magazine, who succumbed to addiction and disappeared. I'm sure you'll find it interesting if you haven't seen it already, and it clearly outlines one possible answer to "what if?"
http://j.mp/dkz8hY

Ebert: Terrifying.

I'm reading "Blood Meridian" at the moment, and I'm finding it very hard to focus. The internet is just instant gratification, whereas "Blood Meridian's" rewards must be earned.

I've only really got my brain. I hope, since I grew up with and within the internet, I haven't lost my ability to actually use the darn thing in a deep, meaningful way.

I'm a college instructor, so I have lots of free time in the summer.

I'm doing the same thing - my daily routine is to read a book, write a blog, listen or watch a podcast, tweet, repeat.

And Roger - at least part of the reason you have so many followers is that you are famous! Thanks be to TV!

Roger, through Twitter and your blog you have become one of my favorite writers. The depth and clarity of your thinking, the razor-sharp wit, your skill with a simple sentence have all conspired to make me a fan - and I really don't call myself a "fan" of much of anything.

I just wanted to share this: my son is autistic and until age 4 he was non-verbal, completely mute. But through mediums that The Thinkers usually tell us are bad for our kids - TV, computers - we have discovered a great deal about our boy and what he is really like. Autism can function like a scrim between a child's inner self and the world around him, but my son's love of television and his facility with computers has begun to lift that veil.

I point this out because for us, it appears that technology and my son's use of it has gone a long way towards bringing him closer to us. If these things (he is an avid web surfer, by the way, particularly obsessed with Youtube's vast collection of movie logo videos) have somehow rewired him, it has been for the better, and worked hand-in-hand with the occupational and speech therapy he has received in school.

So - I guess I have a hard time worrying about the question of whether or not using this particular medium is somehow reconfiguring my brain. If my son is an example of how application of intellect to technology can enhance a connection between loved ones, I'm focusing on that. His ability to type things on a computer or communicate through a language of like/dislike related to TV-watching has added depth to our relationship and to my own thinking about the world around us, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Other than a brief Twitter burst today, I'm trying to catch my frisson from sources off of the internet this Memorial Day weekend.

- downloading some Kindle books. I've never read Cormac McCarthy that many of you talk about here. So, I'll start with "The Road". Any others recommended?

- my new "Court Yard Hounds" CD, from Emily & Martie. The sisters that form the core of the Dixie Chicks. I feel a connection to them. I was an attendee at a densely technical conference at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas in 1995. Tuesday night was banquet night. We had a Texas barbeque, and music from a little local Dallas band - the Dixie Chicks! I think that was before Natalie Maines became their singer. The sisters pounded out a mean Orange Blossom Special.

- Is there an entertainer alive who can match the show put on by Madonna on her "Sticky and Sweet Tour" DVD? I think not.

Off the grid for the rest of this thunderstorming holiday.

Ebert: For some reason I suspect you might like Cormac's "All the Pretty Horses."

Roger -

As a young, driven, film-obsessed student, I find that you are right, and that my own observation of young people (I'm 18) is a little more frightening that what you've observed changing in your own brain.

I go to Harvard University and chose to go instead of accepting a scholarship at USC Film School. My thought process was that even though I want to be a filmmaker, I thought it would make more sense to try to surround myself with people who - like me - enjoy thinking, talking, and reading about the world at large, not just film.

However, what I found stood in such stark contrast to the Harvard of the 70s and the 80s that I had read about in my youth. I found a place where superficiality was prized not just socially, but INTELLECTUALLY. It's not about the number of books you've read, but the number of wikipedia articles on books that you've skimmed so that it appears as if you've read a lot of books (I've succumbed to this as much as anybody else - it's a plague.)

I know I might seem like some sort of grizzled old man talking about the way things used to be. I've always obsessed myself with great thinkers, and find that, year by year, the way people think has become less and less great. Every year I've seen go by has become - for lack of a better word - stupider.

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, which I know you are infinitely familiar with. I went to Boulder High School and, throughout my time there noticed something very interesting. The smartest, most creative people I met there are, by and large, the seniors I met when I was a freshman. Now that's not because I'm some sort of self-absorbed precocious upstart who thinks he can only relate to those who are older. When I'm around these older friends now, I still feel as if they are quicker, sharper, wittier than my peers, even if they've been doing more drugs than what may be considered humanly possible.

My point is that it's a mental change that I have observed year by year. It's not gradual, it has been immediate. I graduated from Boulder High in 2009. The class the graduated in 2010 are almost all, by and large, stupid. Not one person seemed to make an effort to do something meaningful, to rise to the top. It's not a symptom of just my high school either - it's one that me my friends have noticed County-Wide.

If Harvard has been plagued by intellectual superficiality, then one might think there is some reason to despair. But it's just a university with a fancy title that is build upon it's on need for academic supremacy. I think that what I loved so much about your article is that you realize the effects the internet has, and you make an effort to combat them. Consciously. Will the class of the intellectual elite shrink substantially over the course of the next 50 years? Of course. Will there still be those people that deep down prize their brains and prize intellectual discourse who will never give up on stretching and improving their minds? Of course.

Schools like Harvard will begin to diminish in their academic importance when it becomes clear that intellectualism will be a personal choice - as it has always been. But this time, the choice will be to manage and avoid what is possibly the biggest intellectual temptation of all time.

The reason, Roger, that you are possibly the single person in the world I can pick out of thin air and say "that man is my muse, my hero," is because you never give up. You have evolved through about a hundred different permutations of yourself, each time approaching the next with fervor. Even now, you're going to learn sign language. One of my great friends is your friend Michael Aisner, and I cannot tell you the conversations we have had in hopes that you picked up sign language, for only the fact that we wanted you to be able to communicate as quickly and snarkily as you always have. If you are able to have undergone such radical transformations with such ease, my hope is that I will be able to eradicate the superficiality of the internet from my psyche. Indeed, if I ever hope to be even a mediocre filmmaker, I have a lot of brain chemistry to change.

Now the only problem is that I find myself checking your site 5 or 6 times a day in the hope you've posted a new review or a new blog. You, Mr. Ebert, have become a source of frisson for me, which is remarkable.

In other news, do you think you could write a review of They All Laughed? I'm desperate to see what you think about it.

Ebert: This is worse than I feared.

I made it a Twitterpage.

The prospect of becoming something akin to a goldfish - not having an attention span of more than a few seconds - does really terrify me. And yet I continue to surf for a least 2 hours a day, often more. I always make time to read (currently reading a 700 some page biography of Ataturk) and meditate, usually before I go to sleep. But I definitely spend more time online that I would like to. It's just that, when I sit down and start clicking on links, it's so hard to STOP.

Ugh. I was just discussing my own addictive and counterproductive Internet behavior with a friend/mentor. He suggested I unplug my hard drive and store it at his place for 30 days. I instantly saw two things: 1) It was a brilliant suggestion. 2) There was no way on God's green earth I was going to take it. I rationalized my unwillingness by thinking of all the productive things I COULD be doing with the Internet. I told myself I surely would do those productive things now that I'd unburdened myself to my friend. That was three days ago. How much productive stuff have I accomplished online since then? Uh ...

Not like you need another comment on this -- I couldn't even read all the ones left so far, though I got through a lot and they added to the experience of reading your post. But I'll respond anyhow, since this subject is so close to me and, as usual, you summed it up with great clarity and asked all the right questions.

I feel as if I've developed adult ADHD sometime during the last decade or so. I was on the computer a lot for work even before that, but I think the invention of email, which it's hard not to check every few minutes to see if you have new goodies, plus the simultaneous rise of the Internet as an ever-deepening tidal wave of information, which makes it hard not to do that thing you describe of going on for one thing and spending an hour doing something else (like reading and responding to this post) is what rewired my brain. And yes, it distresses me that I don't read books much any more, though I used to check out 6 or 7 every week from the library when I was a kid, and was often reading two or three at a time, since I think reading long-form stuff does help you concentrate better and think more deeply.

I recently joined a book club, which is helping -- they pick good books, so that ensures that I read at least one a month. But I want to do better.

Hi Roger,

Downloading books on my Kindle today.

Which one Dickens novel would you recommend for my kids to start with?

(May be hopeless. They are watching Transformers 2 on DVD today).

Ebert: "David Copperfield" may be a little long to start with. "Oliver Twist" is much shorter, and action-packed.

One cannot save time, one can only spend it. So our efforts towards time-saving innovations in the last 100 years have merely meant we can do more in an allotted amount of time. Problem is, I really believe that WE are the bottleneck. The mental rewiring that is the subject of this article is one result. Other results? Lives that move at the speed of sound, stress leave epidemics at work, more input than can possibly be digested (whose list of books/movies/cd's that you want to experience is shrinking? Not mine), and a sense of always lagging behind. I work in the IT field, I'm 46 in a company that has an average age of 32, and I am a dinosaur. No one retires of their own fruition any more. Early retirement is the euphemism for culling the herd, usually around age 50, and you return to the job market supplementing your pension with a job at Lowe's.

Hey Roger...

Here's an idea:

Post a blog entry saying:

"I am about to start reading and in one month I will be blogging about it".

In one month, blog about it. Lots of Ebertinians will join in, I betcha. A very simple social experiment of little effort. No Oprhhesque efforts required.

The Daisy & The Derriere

The daisy was a tulip, the movie was Carry on Nurse, the derriere belonged to Wilfrid Hyde-White (or a derriere double) who imagined his temperature was being taken, the procedure a punishment for his pain-in-the... behavior.


As I recall the dialog:


A cry of astonishment then


'Haven't you ever seen a temperature measurement?'


'Yes, but not with a tulip.'


..Be happy for Wilfrid that it wasn't a rose.

My big resolution last year was to stop reading celebrity news online (difficult) and stop looking at magazines in the grocery checkout line (far, far more difficult). I was determined to wean myself from that particular source of frisson -- especially since I often didn't even know the named celebs who were gaining weight/cheating on each other/eating their young/dressed poorly, so I would have to RESEARCH them just to get the full frisson effect. Good lord, what a waste of my time.

Paradoxically, the internet has helped me start reading again. Not just the book recs I pick up from all over my social network, but because I can track what I read with the GoodReads website. Once I started seeing how few books I read each year, I was galvanized to read more. So there's one good thing for the internet.

Hey Roger, have you ever seen or tried the video game World of Goo? It's available on Mac, PC, and Linux. Whenever you argue that video games can never be art, World of Goo always comes to my mind. If there's any game that is a piece of art, it's World of Goo.

You shouldn't have trouble playing it. It's not an action game, and for the most part, it doesn't take hand-eye coordination. It's a puzzle game with a dark atmosphere and beautiful music. It was made by a total of two people, and they put their hearts and souls into it. I highly recommend it, and I'd like to know what you think.

http://www.2dboy.com/games.php

Ebert: Well, I've ordered it.

I grew up in the 1980's and 1990's. Most people from my generation have fond memories of video games and cable television shows. I didn't have either of those until much later.

To make ends meet, we went without cable television, internet, and video games. Television was of the network variety and for many years it was on a black and white portable set. Internet was installed when it was necessary for school. I played video games at friends houses or