Two articles here that look at the changing landscape for literature: the first through the lens of the genre itself, under seige from a fragmented world of sub-soundbyte infosnatches, the second from the perspective of a perhaps dwindling breed, the editor.

Another death-of-the-book-at-the-hands-of-the-internet article, at the Independent, asks, presumably for the benefit of the recently awoken extended coma victims of the world, whether the book can survive the internet:

A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.

An important contribution to the debate was Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, in which he reports that he can no longer connect with long articles or books the way he used to; the intensity of focus and concentration that used to see him “immersed” in connecting sentences has dissipated. And the villain to whom blame can be attributed is the internet.

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s,” writes Carr, “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

While over at the Telegraph, they riff, around Giroux’s death, on a seldom examined aspect—-the plight of the editor:

Much is made, in the age of online democracy, about the probable demise of the editor – about letting the work speak for itself without mediation or hindrance. Whether the unexpurgated internet can ever produce a Kerouac or a Lowell won’t, one suspects, be known for a long time yet; and maybe editors and cyberspace aren’t incompatible.

But if the life of a dedicated and sensitive editor shows us anything, it must be that even books by the most brilliant of writers are far more collaborative than we allow. As Giroux recollected saying to the not entirely easy-going writer Djuna Barnes, “You have to trust someone, Miss Barnes. Why not trust me?”