The Answer Is... Poem by gershon hepner

As to the Internet we rush,
we have no time to stand and shush.
Reading from the printed page
is something from a bygone age,
and volumes with print authorships
are obsolete as buggy whips.
Who tells imagination: “Pause! ”
now print has reached the menopause,
and pressed for time, not primed for rushes,
we flash and flicker like hot flushes?
Quite surely not the Internet,
addictive as the cigarette;
although it isn’t cancerous,
with speed it says: “The answer is….”

Inspired by a letter by John Gabriel, chairman of the teacher education department at DePaul University, to the NYT on July 31,2008:
I struggle mightily with the book versus digital reading issue. I see the view that reading is reading. I know our real and reading world has changed dramatically. But reading a book — Shakespeare’s “As You Like It, ” Kate Chopin’s “Awakening” — is more of a lasting aesthetic experience than reading the Internet, which is a more ephemeral, economic lure. Books ask us to pause, imagine, shush; the Internet says don’t think much, buy, rush. So, yes, there’s a new kind of reader in town, but please give me Shakespeare and even Jonathan Swift now and forever, and let me take more time to decide on Internet swift. Reading is reading is not always reading.

7/31/08