2217) Most people I know who have embarked even half-heartedly upon the Net say they have no time anymore to read, watch TV, visit with their friends - no time to do all the things they used to do.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2218) The problem is that the technology [of the Internet] isn't particularly hospitable to reading right now. The typical computer screen doesn't offer anything like the clarity and resolution achieved with ink and paper. Even in the classiest, most sophisticated presentations, type that is on the screen has an undifferentiated, flyspeck quality, and though some of us have taught ourselves how to look at this stuff long enough and carefully enough to make our livings from doing so, few people, I think, would do this for pleasure. [...] And then there's the disorienting business of scrolling, as opposed to simply turning a page. The old technology is still more satisfying [...] Page turning is actually faster and more flexible. By taking away many of the visual and tactile cues we use to measure our progress through a text - by making it harder to find one's place - scrolling helps render these texts shapeless.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2219) Electronic communication prizes content over form, information over style, immediacy over proofreading and fact-checking; it tolerates an ungrammatical, misspelled sentence as happily as a correct one, and, by instantly storing a muddled thought in memory or displaying it on a screen, it can make that thought seem as shapely and permanent as a profound one. [...] What works best in this new writing - or what's more effective, at any rate, and what is imitated most often - is not subtlety but cuteness: emoticons, as those ubiquitous happy and sad faces are called - :) and ;( - and all the in-group acronyms and abbreviations that make up so much of what passes for discourse in the discussion groups: "lol," "f2f: and so on. Loudness works, too - lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, that is - and so does rudeness and incivility.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2220) [T]he hypertext philosophy - and some of the libertarianism on the Net - [...] ignores that at a certain level reading is not about freedom at all, but about submission, about stifling your own voice, stilling your mind and yielding fully to the designs (in every sense) of another. If I'm going to read "Vilette," say, I don't want to choose my own Bruges, I want Charlotte Bronte to do it for me. Similarly, I don't want to tell Conor Cruise O'Brien what I think about Thomas Jefferson, I want him to tell me what to think. I want him, that is, to temporarily take over my mind and make use of it. Ultimately, reading is about what happens between a writer and me; it's not a community activity.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2221) [M]ost of the sexual material on the Internet is not particularly erotic; it's not really concerned with sex at all, in fact, but with sexual imagery, devoid of even that filmy peignoir of narrative or context that usually accompanies the cheesiest of magazine spreads, the most low-budget of videos. Context and narrative, you discover in their absence, are no small part of what makes sex sexy.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2222) Most of us have either sent or received an electronic jolt that would have benefited from the cooling-down period afforded by the traditional drawer-yanking search for an envelope and fumble for a stamp. But these occasional melt-downs are a small price to pay for such as benign and transforming invention [as e-mail], one that, if you allow it to, pleasingly combines the virtues of ease and immediacy. The great advantage the E-mail has over the telephone is not just that the line is seldom tied up, but that it forces you, literally, to compose yourself - to create a text that presents you in your own best version.

Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)