Reading in a "Wired" World

/

Here's a trusim: People who have grown up in a wired world view books and reading differently than people like me, whose initial encounter with the wired world came in adulthood. (*1) Put another way, childhood exposure to the internet is having a profound impact on the way human beings learn and how they use reading to learn.

The debate about this generation gap and what it means for the future is fascinating and important. I've been following it for a long time, probably because of my experience as a grad student and then as a professor:

I started teaching college undergrads in the late 1980s. Back then, almost none of my students used computers (Often I was the only person in the classroom who owned and used a computer.) By the late 1990s, however, nearly all of my students were using computers and most had tapped into a mysterious entity known as "the internet." (Mysterious to me because I had no idea what it was or how to use it.)

By the time I left academia in 1999, I was just barely figuring out how to use email -- but I knew that the "wired" world had already provoked a distinct generation gap between people like me, who encountered it first as an adult, and people who'd grown up with it.

Anyway, the New York Times is running a series on this topic and the debate about it. The first part provides an excellent summary of the issues involved. Check out the "Related" sidebar, which contains links to more information. Absolutely worth reading.

It's worth reading just to ponder David McCullough's comment that "learning" is "acquired mainly from books." Huh?? What the FUCK did he think all those Greeks, to name one example, were doing back then? Ya know... Back when there wasn't a Barnes and Noble on every corner and the printing press was still more than a millenia away. When "books" were accessible only to a tiny, and I mean minuscule, portion of the earth's people. No one learned anything? The hell, you say..........

Anyway, in my opinion, not entirely formed from books and therefore possibly a dumbass opinion, is that the debate over the meaning and nature of learning, reading, and books is one of the most important topics of our time. And this Times series provides a good entree into the issues.

______________________________________

*1: I'm in my fifties. I started using a PC in 1984, but I was already 32. I was in my early forties when I first encountered the "world wide web" and the internet. My experience, I know, is very very different than someone who has always known the "wired" world. But then, I'm so old that I grew up with only three TV stations. Hell, I still remember when my family got its first TV set!

"BigDog" and Robotics

/

My husband is a philosopher who specializes in "mind." He sits around reading books about neurophysiology and AI and other stuff, including robotics. He's up on the latest work in all that stuff.

So when he says something is groundbreaking and revolutionary, I take his word for it. And he says this is a spectacular breakthrough in robotics research.

Apparently leg motion is the hardest part of the human anatomy to re-create mechanically. (Well, aside from the brain itself...)

In this case, for example, watch the guy try to knock over BigDog. BigDog is able to keep "his" balance. Amazing. Even more amazing is seeing BigDog keep "his" balance on snow and ice. Anyway, a friend sent him this, and I pass it on to all of you.

I was totally, and I mean totally, creeped out the first time I saw it. I kept thinking that it must all be computer graphics. But no, it's a real, three-dimensional device operating in the "real" world. The Cylons have nuthin' on BigDog. Well, okay, I guess they're better looking. And they wear great clothes. But otherwise.........

The Anheuser-Busch Archives and Library

/

There are few brewery archives left in the United States. Miller Brewing still has one (or so I am told; I was not allowed to use it when I was researching my book.) Time, mergers, and takeovers have taken their toll.

For example, when Paul Kalmanovitz acquired Pabst Brewing in the mid-1980s, most of the Pabst archive was tossed. (Some of it survived and a few years ago the Kalmanovitz Charitable Trust, the entity that owns Pabst, donated it to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But the bulk of the the earliest documents -- letters written by and from Philip Best, for example -- have been destroyed.)

So when I heard the news earlier this summer about the InBev offer for A-B, I was concerned. I’m a historian; it’s my job to fret about things like this.

When I was researching my beer book, I was given permission to use of the collection of books, journals, and other documents at the Anheuser-Busch corporate library. The bulk of the A-B library is devoted to technical and scientific journals, but over the years, the company’s librarians have acquired other materials related to beer, brewing, and the brewing industry.

Many of those items are rare; indeed, some of them are the only copies still in existence. For example, the library holds a complete run of Western Brewer, the most important nineteenth-century brewing industry newspaper. Without it, I would have had a hard time writing the chapters two and three of my book. (As far as I know, only one other run of the publication has survived.)

I was not allowed to use the company’s archive, but an employee told me that it contains a massive collection of letters written by Adolphus Busch. Presumably it also includes letters written by other family members and employees as well as other materials documenting the company’s early history. (Again, I don’t know for certain what’s in it; no one let me anywhere near it. Sad to say.)

The fate of the archive and library is probably low on the list of issues A-B’s executives are tackling these days. And A-B employs an able corporate historian; I am confident that she will do her best to safeguard the collections.

But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to throw in my two cents. On July 15, just after Anheuser-Busch announced the sale of the company to InBev, I wrote to August A. Busch IV expressing my hope that he would protect this piece of his family’s (and American brewing's) history. I also mailed copies of the letter to several other A-B executives (the more the merrier, right?)

I’ve now received a reply from one of the people who read the letter. His message was about what one might expect: polite but noncommittal. Frankly, I doubt anyone knows yet what will happen to the archive and library; after all, the lawyers have only just begun to draw up the terms of the sale and disposal of property. And even if someone has made a decision, he/she is certainly not obliged to tell me.

BUT: at least I know that my letter was read and noted. And I am grateful that the person who replied took time to do so. He’s got bigger worries on his mind, not least of which is the specter of unemployment.

Anyway -- I’ve done what I can. I thank the people at A-B for reading my letter. And I hope with all my historian’s heart that these two collections find a safe home.

Historical Tidbits: Horlacher Brewing, 1975

/

July 1975: The chair of Horlacher Brewing in Allentown, PA, tells a reporter that he's "fighting like hell" to keep his doors open.

Struggling, more like it. Over the previous year or so, the price of malt had risen 120% and corn 100%. Cans had gone up 40 cents a case. The price of coal had risen from $15.75 a ton to $48.45. Horlacher's city water bill was about to go up 72%. The company made 60,000 barrels of beer a year, a mere drop compared to A-B's 1975 output of 35 milllion barrels. Just a few months earlier, Miller Brewing had unleashed Miller Lite on the world (along with millions of dollars in advertising.) And Schaefer Brewing of New York was making some of its six million barrels at a new and highly efficient brewhouse just down the road from Horlacher.

Horlacher's fight ended in 1978.

______________________

Quote from "Kleine Nachrichten," Modern Brewery Age, volume 26 (July 21, 1975), page 3.