Literature in the Digital Age

In Adam Hammond’s book Literature in the Digital Age, he examines a number of questions, which pertain to the survival of print literature in an era, where everything is becoming digital. Hammond begins by employing McLuhan’s famously confusing theory “the medium is the message”, which only began to “come into focus in 1993 with the birth of the internet” (3). The theory does not imply the content of the message to be the medium, but the new medium, which “creates a new situation for human associations and human perceptions” (3). 

      Hammond continues to discuss the intrinsic swing from literary reading, noting “No group is more sensitive to the changes inherent in the shift to digital forms than readers of literature” (4). In part one of Hammond’s text, he goes further to include Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic article, “Is Good Making Us Stupid”, in which Hammond examines changes in Carr’s “slackening in his ability to focus” (5). The digital era is causing an inevitable shift in literature as it has been known for centuries; Hammond notes “it is a specific type of reading – literary reading…is most threatened in the digital age” (5). 

     In response to Carr’s argument that the internet initiated the death of literary reading, Clay Shirky disagrees noting television initially casted the first stone, which led to literature’s downfall, however where television didn’t completely destroy literature, stating it “retained some cultural statues”, the digital era finished the job. This new era does, for better or for worse, “bring back literature as an activity”, it, nevertheless, failed to pull literary reading back into the scope of popularity (8). This new form of “digital textuality”, according to Shirky, delineates a new form of democracy, which “expands our ability to create and share written material” (8). 

     Overall, Hammond goes into the history of writing and literature to highlight the shift and popularity of literary reading and its downfall. Hammond demarcates different notions of digitalized writing, and eventually concludes that “the fate of print is by no means sealed” (20). Literature’s embracing of digitalization will call for a literary digital renaissance, according to Hammond, but of course, that remains to be seen.

T. E. Stroud