In the New York Times, 37-year-old novelist Gary Shteyngart writes how buying his first iPhone caused him to start looking at the world in a new way. Later he decided that was not a good thing. He piled Russian novels into his car and headed out of the city to reconnect with who he was before the iPhone.
Shteyngart is one more (articulate) writer struggling to understand his relationship to the new media.
I came across him, by the way, while listening to an interview on CBC radio. Shteyngart's an unusual guy. At age 10 he emigrated to the USA from the old Soviet Union and is still deeply connected to his Russian roots. He speaks Russian fluently and has warm regard for his more "cultured" early childhood while disapproving of the lack of freedom in Russia then and now. (He's also a funny guy.)
The irony, perhaps, is that I was able to learn about Shteyngart and quickly tell you about him because of new media (media that has emerged in the last 20 years). I didn't have to go to the library and look up his name in a reference book. I also, thanks to new media, by the way, have been perusing a favorite, classic book online. I'd loaned my paper copy of it to someone about eight years ago and never got it back. The question of what is good and what is not so good about new media continues to be complicated.
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