On The Media: Transcript of "Panoramic View" (April 16, 2010)
DAVE EGGERS: For me, I don't know what I would do if I didn't have two, three daily papers a day to read. I don't want to read online. I don't want to wake up and look at a screen. I feel like, you know, as a society, we try to put everything on that same goddamn screen. And pretty soon we're going to be eating on the screen or like -[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
- making love through the screen. It’s just sort of like why does everything have to be on a screen?
You know, there’s been some study that was quoted in one of our panels that said that even how we read our blood pressure is different when we read on print than when we read online. I think that it’s too exciting and distracting online. There’s always some button that wants you to click to cat porn, you know, online.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
It’s just like you’re trying to read some article and it’s flashing and it’s telling you to go somewhere else.
[LAUGHS] I like the curatorial, the calmness, the authority of a daily paper. But I do think that it’s a time to make the paper form more robust and more surprising and beautiful and expansive. People still want to read long form literary journals and nonfiction, etc., and so why can't the print medium do that and be that home and leave the Internet to do the more quick thinking and quick reacting things?
I tend to agree. The internet is not for deep content. It's a shallow quick fix in comparison.