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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

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The Medium Mangles the Message

By Lisa Zeidner
Posted Thursday, July 1, 1999, at 11:43 AM ET

Dear John,

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My last novel took me five years. Must say, I have found committing to print as quickly as we've done here downright terrifying. The odds of error go way, way up.

Case in point: On Wednesday, in the letter on the president's possible peter problems that has become (to both of our discomfort) the banner headline for our exchange, I made a typo that I didn't catch. Sent a P.S. to one of the editors that you never get to meet, no less even talk to in person anymore, because of e-mail: " 'Penic' should read 'penis.' In case you were wondering." Someone--I suspect Judith, in Manhattan--fires back, "Thanks for clarifying. We thought 'penic' was some special Serbian organ." I laughed pretty hard at that. But then the piece goes online and, lo, the "penic" stays. I call. (Though we are all hooked intravenously to our e-mail, it is still only a phone call that confirms that the person is actually alive in time at that moment.) "No prob," I am told by someone--I think in Seattle--and behold, the organ is magically, instantaneously fixed.

No prob, of course--a minor matter. But anyone who has ever been written about can attest that the inaccuracy is rife, and often troubling.

Another case in point: I got, yesterday, from a journalist-friend, the following scolding e-mail:

How can you guys be talking about the front page of the Times and miss the day's big gaff: two refers to the same story about tax cuts right next to each other?? Maybe it was corrected in the issue that made it to the boonies? Maybe it's just too inside-baseball for you Zeitgeist-types? Who knows ...

The boo-boo was indeed corrected on my paper. I must ask this friend whether the issue will now become valuable, like a misprinted postage stamp. Perhaps Slate has already dealt with this--I wouldn't know, because I can't get online, because the commercial Internet provider hooked up to my new speed-of-light laptop is, yet again, "experiencing technical difficulties," and yet again the Information Highway is like Friday summer beach traffic.

And newspapers now represent the careful, meditative prose--as opposed to TV or the Web sites of most newspapers, which do not really offer that much fresh news on those hourly updates but rather seem to shovel the same stories around on the tray, like crusty, ancient lo mein in a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet.

Explain to me: What is the advantage to all this instantaneousness? Is there any gain at all? Or have we been rendered idiots by it--a nation of manic clickers on the universal remote?

Hope I can get this to you. If not, maybe I can rent a horse, and learn how to ride one, so I can thunder over the Ben Franklin Bridge, hand a longhand version to you personally.

Love,
L