“You know I think next year you’ll be old enough that you can do these posters all on your own.”

“In third grade they have to dress up like someone and do a report about that.”

“Who do you want to be?”

“I don’t know if it has to be someone from Chicago. Maybe Michael Jordan?”

“That would be cool.”

“It’s too bad I’m not from where Dr. J is from, I could dress up with a big afro.”

“…”

What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism …

… this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

In Conversation With Robert Silvers — New York Magazine.

That’s from a much longer review with Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. It was published before the Boston bombings, but after a week in which we saw a lot of criticism of social media for its accuracy and ability to spread misinformation, it feel prescient. What kind of criticism could address social media, besides the kind of media/journalism fact-checking we have now? How would you define a body of work—is it based on one account, one publication, an series of events? Who decides what to include? As shorter forms of disconnected text become the dominant form of discourse, it’s an interesting problem.

It’s precisely the physical, antedeluvian aspect of the drive that makes it useful. It’s like a worry-bead, or a bracelet — a constant physical reminder that there’s something I should be doing. When I remove it from my pocket to put it on the tray at security, before I board an eight-hour flight, it’s a reminder that maybe I should make some progress on that chapter rather than watch “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” for the eighth time. Or, leaving the office for the one-hour train ride home, I check to make sure it’s there and realize I should tinker with the presentation I have to give next month instead of spending the commute checking blogs on my iPad.

I like this idea. It reminds me of David Allen’s “leave it by the door” trick*, where you put something where you’ll literally trip over it on the way out of the house if you absolutely have to remember to bring it with you. Like Gross says, it’s a physical reminder that you can’t ignore, partly because it seems slightly out of context in a slick touchscreen and cloud world, and partly because it simply has a physical size and weight, not some list you can tuck away in a notebook or close on an app. From my experience, making long-term promises to myself in an Evernote list or Dropbox folder is a surefire way for me to forget them.

* PS: No joke, I went to search for a link on David Allen of “Getting Things Done” fame and one of the first things I found was something I wrote years ago for 43 Folders. I’ve been thinking about this stuff way too long.

[S]he was extremely self-aware, and there are moments when she seems to recognize the corrosive potential of her self-absorption: “If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness,” she wrote, “my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius — a genius — a genius.” It’s a startlingly candid admission: If I weren’t so engrossed with myself, I could accomplish greater things.

I don’t know about you, but who hasn’t had that feeling every time they log on to Twitter or Facebook. Maybe not the feeling that it’s self-obsession driving you to spend your time with fleeting updates, but a sense that if you just stopped to enjoy a moment with your own eyes instead of futzing with your iPhone you might take away something more meaningful.

When I upgraded my iPhone last year, I gave Carter my old one. It’s deactivated; he can’t make calls or send texts, but he can still use it for games, music, etc. We were off for spring break this week, and went to Shedd Aquarium Thursday. He brought the phone with him, stopping every few feet to take a blurry picture of every single fish in every single tank. At one point I told him to put it away. “Just stop and look at the jellyfish with your own eyes.” He argued with me. I sounded like a nag, as I probably do in this post. It’s just that sometimes all the photos and updates make me tired, and I hope he gets a sense of where to draw the line.

Mandel summed up the way I feel about the whole business in her essay:

I’ve been a sporadic and somewhat ambivalent participant of late. Long periods of time go by when I post almost nothing of my own and only respond to other people’s updates, because what it comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life on the Internet, or you don’t. It’s not that I find my life uninteresting, it’s just that I’m not at all sure why anyone else would be interested, aside from my mom. I keep a sporadic diary, because I want to remember my life, but I have a hard time imagining why I’d want to display that life for public consumption. I deeply value my privacy.

The privacy bit may be a little hypocritical for me. The longer I’ve been online the more I’ve drawn inward, but I lean more toward the “why anyone else would be interested” part. And this is probably not the best thing to admit now that I make a living in social media,and gear up to go back to work after a week off.

Clearly the focus of their development has been to replace mass-market paperbacks. E-readers are not designed for people who interpret books. No effort has been put into design questions for serious readers, for people who try to figure out the meaning of texts. They are hard to flip back to an old section and they are still awkward for note-taking. There are a significant number of people who want the best possible, coziest experience when they read, and they have been for the most part ignored.

I tend to agree. As much as I love the convenience of buying and reading books on my iPad, they are awkward for doing any real work. I reviewed a scholarly book on medical racism for TriQuarterly recently, and it would have been impossible to work with that text as an e-book. I’m a gadget guy through and through, but I needed to be able to flip back and forth to the bibliography, highlight quotes and flag pages with sticky notes to get anything done. That book was intimidating enough without wresting with clunky software.

My only question is how simple e-readers could evolve to accommodate this kind of work without sacrificing their convenience. Basically, how do you make them more useful without turning them into a laptop?

“Our stories don’t need soundtracks. Our interviews don’t need video ‘enhancements.’ We’re not in the movie business. The trick with new technologies and platforms is figuring out how they can help you—rather than tailoring your mission to match what they can do.”

That’s Lorin Stein from the Paris Review talking to Publisher’s Weekly about how literary magazines are adapting to digital, and I couldn’t agree more. One of the things that’s always bothered me when I read articles or hear talks about the fate of literature online is this insistence that writers and publishers have to turn into multimedia producers, because that’s just what people do on the web. People really seem to like YouTube, the theory goes, so we need to make our stories and essays look more like YouTube.

I’ve always compared this to DVDs stuffed with extras that no one watches, those director’s commentaries and “making of” shorts that are just tacked on because they had an extra gigabyte to burn on the disc. Sure, you can make beautiful things like Snow Fall out of literature and journalism online, but unless there’s a compelling reason to do it, one that adds to the telling of the story or advances a narrative, it’s just a waste of time for both the content producer (erstwhile writers and publishers) and consumers (what we used to call simply “readers”). There’s nothing wrong with adapting your tried and true publishing schedule or format to the web, but you don’t add value by pretending to be something you’re not.

After years of begging, we bought Carter a video game console this year, a Nintendo Wii U, the fancy new one with the game pad with a second screen. We held out for so long because we wanted him to be old enough to work it himself, but I was also afraid if we got one I’d play it too much. You can see how well that’s going.

Carter’s favorite game is NBA 2K13, which besides having every single NBA player rendered down to the last drop of sweat, lets you start a career with a custom character. I suppose I could’ve made a 7’3″ guy who looks like Shaq and could dunk without jumping, but I couldn’t resist living out the Hoosier kid’s dream and making myself a scrappy, long-range gunner.

So instead of reading books after putting the kids to bed, I’ve been sitting downstairs practicing catch and shoot threes. Did I say living the dream? Maybe this is rock bottom.