Stop the presses! The New Yorker, our sister publication and a magazine so staid that yes, in fact, it does insist on capping the second "o" in "cooperate" with a diaeresis, is mixing it up in the blogosphere—and over Twitter, no less! One wonders how far we are from the day on which The New Yorker ditches its famous cartoons for images of cute kittens captioned with the word "Lulz."

Once you've recovered from the shock of witnessing the Twit-slapping taking place among New York's media elite, however, it's worth considering an important question raised by The New Yorker's George Packer: Webheads may read more overall, but are we reading fewer books? And is that a bad thing?

This fairly polite brouhaha started when Packer took to the Web to complain that "I can hardly escape the demands of the throbbing networked intelligence, the nonstop nagging of the wired collective voice." The latest set of shouts from this collective voice is Twitter, and Packer doesn't want anything to do with it.

"The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning."

What is Packer drowning in? It's information, of a sort, but it seems to be more about stimuli. Constant bombardment keeps the brain from focused work; an obsession with blogs and tweets, though not on its own problematic, quickly crowds out limited time for other forms of thought and reading.

From a few blocks away, Bits blogger Nick Bilton used his outpost at The New York Times to take on Packer, calling him out as the sort of man who might well have opposed train travel more than a century ago.

"Ironically, Mr. Packer notes how much he treasures his Amtrak rides in the quiet car of the train, with his laptop closed and cellphone turned off," writes Bilton. "As I’ve found in previous research, when trains were a new technology 150 years ago, some journalists and intellectuals worried about the destruction that the railroads would bring to society. One news article at the time warned that trains would 'blight crops with their smoke, terrorize livestock... and people could asphyxiate' if they traveled on them."

(As someone who has actually ridden Amtrak coaches overnight all the way across the country, I would like to chime in at this point to say that one can indeed come quite close to asphyxiation when breathing the early morning fug cast up by a hundred sleeping bodies wedged, with various degrees of discomfort, on the reclining blue seats. Those old Victorian doubters were on to something.)

This led, as such things do in the blogosphere, to a response from Packer in which Bilton is roundly mocked for such things as specializing in "futurism." More importantly, it led to this passage:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript,' a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution. In fact, I’d think asking such questions would be an important part of the job of a media critic, or a lead Bits blogger.

This struck me most because I've been feeling the same sense of loss over the past few months and pondering ways to respond. One response: university studies are "rarefied air" for those who love books, and complaining later in life that one doesn't have the same amount of time for reading is simply a function of Real Life, Adult Responsibilities, and Having a Family.

For instance, while in graduate school studying literature, I at one point decided to track my reading. From January 1 through May 15, 2000, I recorded 12,907 pages of books read—everything from Barry Unsworth's Morality Play to Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing to 750 unbelievably dull pages on The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. That comes out, almost incredibly as I reflect back on it, to 2,868 pages per month, or a complete book every 2.2 days.

In contrast, this January I muddled through a pair of books. Part of me says that this, while regrettable, is a simple function of putting food on the table, having a job in which reading is essential but "books" are too often out of date, and spending time with two small children. In other words, it is the reality for everyone but the rare few whose working lives revolve around books.

This is comforting ("it's not my fault!") but hardly a complete picture. The reality is that in grad school I had only a dial-up Internet account, no DVD player, no streaming movies from Netflix, no DVR, and in fact no TV. I had no game consoles. I took no magazine subscriptions. I followed no blogs. I had no iPhone. Twitter did not exist. At the end of day, my brain had not spent eight hours being lit like a neon sign, constant stimulus piled upon stimulus so thickly that even to calm the mind and enter a state in which prolonged reading is possible some days feels difficult.

This is the heart of Packer's complaint about the effect of technology on "available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world." Certainly, these advances in entertainment and communications produce tremendous good, but for those of us with limited time, they carry a real cost. Drowning in choice and bombarded with a sense of urgency ("But my favorite blog/e-mail account/DVR may have something new! I must check it!"), it's just easier to skim and jump our way across short bits of connected content than to make a sustained act of will and attention.

In this way, our brains become mirrors of the Web, tuned to link and skim and synthesize and respond. But are we losing the very ability to concentrate? Some argue that we are.

Whatever happens inside the brain, my concern right now is simply to get more facetime with the printed page. Neal Stephenson's 960-page Anathem, given to me by Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, seems a pretty good way to measure the depth of my own attention span—the opening pages are dense, even dull.

But technology can't always be bad, even for book reading; every Ars staffer with a Kindle now says that they read far more than they used to. And it was Packer's own blog posts that inspired these reflections on the importance and pleasure of lengthy reading.