Madeleine Schwartz is a junior at Harvard, a staff writer at the Crimson, and a former Book Bench intern. We asked her to tell us what to give members of her generation this holiday season. Consult our ongoing guide for more suggestions.
Teen-agers and college students—do they even read books these days? The reports from the trenches look grim. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, software modelled on social-networking sites looks poised to overtake books as the preferred study technology. The New York Times recently ran a story about a high-school classroom where fewer than a third of students could be counted upon to do the night’s reading—they were too busy perusing their Facebooks.
So what do you give someone who loves the Internet more than anything? Books about the Internet, of course! Here are two that will engage the techiest generation—and they’re even printed on paper.
Randall Munroe started drawing the faceless stick figures in his comic “xkcd,” now collected in “xkcd: Volume 0,” during his day job as a NASA employee. Munroe gained attention when his online comics were picked up by BoingBoing, and since then his success has been tabulated mainly in page views. This Web-only existence, though, posed a problem when he decided to collect his work into a book last year. The quality of most of the online images wasn’t good enough to print in high resolution. Some comics had just disappeared when their URLs were deleted. So Munroe drew them all over again.
“xkcd” abounds with references to online chatrooms and computer programming. It sometimes runs on the kind of humor that would make the older generation wince. In one comic, a man reads the Wikipedia entry on “Foreplay” as he snuggles with a woman. Another depicts a couple walking around to get away from their computers, only decide that “This will make for a great Livejournal entry.” But Munroe is a talented cartoonist (see his “Cartoon-Off” with Farley Katz) and his exchanges are warmhearted, often romantic. He excels at capturing awkwardness around the opposite sex—an eternal teen-age worry.
For a more serious look at the Internet and its future, there’s “The Master Switch,” by Tim Wu. Wu, who teaches at Columbia's law school, was recently featured on New Yorker Currents, the magazine’s video series, to discuss how corporate power and government regulations affect the openness of American information industries. This idea is expounded upon in his book. By looking at radio, telephone, television, and film, Wu shows how these industries rigidified and closed as corporations gained control. The book is full of interesting tidbits on the history of technology—I particularly liked the reading about how A.T. & T. suppressed research about answering machines because they feared it might stop people from using the telephone. Wait until the college kids tweet about it.
(Image: “M.C. Hammer Slide,” by Randall Munroe.)
