Last week Hannah Harlow and Sam Pfeifle, the brother-and-sister owners of the Book Shop of Beverly Farms, Beverly, Mass., sent a store e-mail to customers with a message we think brilliantly captures the power and necessity of books in this difficult time:
Hello everyone!
One consequence of the social media era has been the flattening of expertise. While for most of the 20th century people were forced to research questions via bookstores, libraries, magazines, and newspapers, places where information was largely created and curated by people whose job it was to research questions, people now get their updates on the latest war overseas or budding national pandemic from some anonymous poster named "PinkCowLicker" via some woman they went to high school with 23 years ago. And they repeat it as gospel, often arguing with people who've spent their lives researching the topic.
We understand the impulse, sometimes. It's true that information was often deliberately kept from the general public (and still is). That reporters hid the fact that FDR was in a wheelchair is one of those things that everyone knows now, but seems incredible in today's environment. The egalitarianism of the social media era was intoxicating for some. No more gatekeepers!
The pendulum, however, seems to have swung too far in the other direction. People with great power gleefully wear their ignorance like a badge of honor, assuming everyone who studied the question before them was just some dummy. Luckily, books still exist. Are non-fiction books as fact-checked as they ought to be? They're really not. Does the prospect of AI assistance mean that the sheer effort that used to be required to write a book (and therefore conferred some authority to the writer) is no longer the filter it once was? Absolutely.
The book as an information delivery system, though, provides depth and nuance and time for contemplation that's just not available via a digital device and screen. It offers fewer distractions, a durability, a physical reminder, a gift that you can hand to someone with so much more substance than a link.
Maybe you know someone who has become addle-brained by the internet. Who is not the person you once knew. Who seems to embrace casual cruelty and uses crazy internet terms like "the sin of empathy." If you know someone like that, hand them a book. And if you're wondering which book to hand them, swing on in and we'll talk you through it.
With open minds and open hearts...
Hannah Harlow and Sam Pfeifle, Book Shop of Beverly Farms