Living Hell Jeremy Lewis
The internet is the enemy of chance discoveries, says JEREMY LEWIS
THE GREAT THING about the internet is that one can look things up quickly and efficiently, from train timetables and opening hours to the dates of kings and queens. What I hate about it is that it is, by its very nature, logical and sequential; and, as such, it’s the enemy of those great stimulants of life and variety, serendipity and luck. I’ve spent my working life in publishing and the literary world, and I worry that over-dependence on the internet is bound to make us increasingly narrow, conventional and predictable in terms of what we know and think and write about. Take, for example, our old but vanishing friend the dusty second-hand bookshop, more grandly referred to nowadays as the ‘antiquarian’ bookshop. One of the great pleasures of visiting such places was scouring the shelves and spotting out of the corner of one’s eye a book one had always wanted to read but had never got round to – and coming out not just with the book one had hoped to find but with something unexpected as a bonus. Nowadays most people buy their secondhand books online. One almost always finds what one wants, and gets it within a day or two; but one goes in looking for a particular book, and having ordered it one is then referred to other books by the same author, or books of a similar kind. Browsing, and the element of chance, are becoming things of the past.
The same applies to consulting reference books online: one of the joys of riffling through Who’s Who or an Oxford Companion to this or that was coming across information by chance, of discovering things by accident en route to the particular piece of information one was after: but if, as seems likely, such books end up entirely online, riffling too will be condemned to oblivion. And the same goes for newspapers. Alan Rusbridger, the excellent and recently departed editor of the Guardian, believes that the future of newspapers is online, and that the paper version is bound to go the way of the dinosaur. I find that a dreadful prospect. I read his old paper online, partly because (unlike the Times) it doesn’t have a paywall, which means that I can read it free, and partly because, as an increasingly reluctant Telegraph reader, I want to find out what the other side is thinking; but I find it a very unsatisfactory business. Once again, I miss the pleasures of serendipity, of skimming and riffling and catching things out of the corner of my eye. Reading a paper online is far too logical and linear a business: if I buy a paper copy of the Guardian I’ll spend at least half an hour reading it, whereas the online version takes me ten minutes at most.
One of the seasonal rituals of oldfashioned literary life, and a very pleasurable one at that, was looking through publishers’ spring and autumn catalogues to see what they’d be publishing over the next six months. Authors with forthcoming books were pleased to see their names in print alongside a eulogistic blurb and a rather less flattering author photograph; literary editors and features editors used the catalogue to take note of books that might be of interest to them; booksellers found them an invaluable source of information, as did literary agents, rival publishers and even some members of the general public.
Now, needless to say, all the big publishers have decided to do away with their printed catalogues and display their wares solely online. More often than not their websites are unintelligible and over-complicated, with the result that those of us who write, read or review books are hard-pressed to know what is in the pipeline. Over the past thirty years publishing has become a worryingly halfwitted profession: all credit to free spirits like Ernest Hecht, who has been running his hugely successful Souvenir Press since 1951 and still prints a six-monthly seasonal list.
One of the more irritating manifestations of noise pollution is the repetitive squawking voice, reminiscent of the most sinister kind of ventriloquist’s doll, which some lorries set off when reversing, warning those of us who might not have noticed, ‘Caution: this vehicle is now reversing.’ The other day I came across an even more ludicrous version, viz. a lorry, with its indicator light already flashing, warning us, in urgent tones, ‘Caution: this truck is turning left.’ Before long, no doubt, some lorries will carry a voice intoning ‘Caution: this vehicle is coming towards you.’
While on the subject of motoring, why are so many road signs obscured by bushes and branches, or rendered illegible by some kind of creeping green moss? My wife thinks it’s part of a conspiracy to make us all buy satnavs, and she’s a very wise woman.