Sorry, English major, the engineers have triumphed
Sorry, English major, the engineers have triumphed

          
          
Andrew Nachison, cofounder of We Media, argues that access to so much digital knowledge might be edging out other kinds of knowing, leaving us to drown in a sea of facts.
"It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it's even alienated us from the physical world itself—from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing, and tasting life. From looking into someone's eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it's made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It's enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy." 
The death of literature?
 If the Internet changes the way that we think and process information, it must also have some effect on the way that we produce information. Sorry, fellow English majors—novels belong to the past.
Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU and a prolific author himself, says that over the next decade, "Long-form expressive fiction will suffer (though this suffering has been more or less constant since the invention of radio) while all numeric and graphic forms of rendering knowledge, from the creation and use of databases to all forms of visual display of data will be in a golden age, with ordinary nonfiction writing getting a modest boost. So, English majors lose, engineering wins, and what looks like an Up or Down question says more about the demographic of the answerer than any prediction of the future." 
Kluth, of The Economist, agrees that people will read more "in terms of quantity, but more promiscuously and at shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays... This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and storytelling, in 'haiku culture' replacing 'book culture.'"
But will a culture oriented to short forms create non-ephemeral material? In other words, will we create classic literature this way?
Some are pessimistic. Gene Spafford of Purdue University sums up the objection: "Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read."


          
                  