Can Twitter Save Books?
Posted by Gabriella_Mangino on Monday, Jun 21, 2010
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Many people are worried that technology is slowly killing literacy and the Internet is rotting our brains. But The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean found maybe all those Internet people still like to read books, and that social media might even save the struggling books business.
Last week, she conducted some accidental social research that revealed “tweeps” like books just as much Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga (though books didn’t stand a chance against the World Cup and others in the Top 20 trending topics for the week.)
Story goes Orlean had the book, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” stuck in her head when she woke up. So she hit Twitter and posted hashtag #booksthatchangedmyworld.
Thousands responded—56,667 people pushed for John Irving’s “Prayer for Owen Meany” and many others shared “The Bible <3" (a more comprehensive list is at the Book Bench).
Days later the conversation is still raging. Orlean tried to snatch up the #booksthatchangedmyworld domain, to give her Twitter experiment and book-loving a more respectable cyberhome, but someone was one step ahead of her. She got around the domain squatting and bought the “THEbooksthatchangedworld” instead—so you can look out for that in the near future.
Orlean’s response to the phenomenon was “Wow! My faith in humanity restored… I’m proud as punch.” But is Twitter just turning books into another meme? Does it even matter if Internet peeps like to read? As Nicholas Carr might put it—is it just a bunch of Internet-rotted brains shallowly reading a book? Or is social media what the printed page (and the “reading part” of our brain) needs to survive?
Maybe social media will revitalize the fledgling book business, and old-fashioned hardcovers and paperbacks will win the war against the electronic reader. And maybe our brains aren’t rotting, and the Internet might even make things better. Could Twitter save literacy?
more about the Internet rotting your brain at Motherboard
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About the author
Sometimes the world has a load of questions (me too). gabriella@motherboard.tv
