I haven't read tons of Tolstoy. Some of the stuff I read of his were the non fiction, autobiographical essays. They weren't  easy reading but I don't regret the time spent studying them and it definitely wasn't a waste of time. I wish I HAD read War and Peace.  I've read more Dostoyevsky, another iconic Russian author of a similar era. I was kind of shocked when Clay Shirky posted that "No one reads War and Peace, It's too long, and not so interesting."  Mr. Shirky is a digital media scholar and professor at New York University so I guess I shouldn't have been shocked. I will say that if I looked into a crystal ball and found that within a year I successfully completed and comprehended the full of War and Peace, I would be more proud of myself than if I suddenly found myself a Twitter Star with millions of followers. To read a period piece from another era takes a lot of concentration, motivation, and stamina. It's much like training for a marathon except it benefits our imagination instead of our heart rate. To suggest that long books from another time don't have a place in education is a great way to become popular with students who don't want to read that kind of stuff. But if future literature classes entail staring at books with large illustrations or breaking down the meaning of various profound tweets, I think we may be in trouble at least on an educational level.

When our  brains develop and  digest literature that is just out of our intellectual reach, this benefits us. Whenever our brains are stretched it's a boon, whether if we're learning to code a difficult language, or reading about circumstances that are completely foreign to us. I can get that perhaps there are titles within the literature community that are a bit dry (he mentioned Proust which I'd agree with.)  But something my dad used to say that echoes in the chamber of my brain is "Do you always need to be entertained?" If everything needs to be hyperstimulated for us to pay attention, our mind will lose motivation to seek out challenges and we will just want to study the low hanging fruit, whatever comes easiest. If we aren't encouraged and egged on to seek to understand the works of Shakespeare, or plays by writers like Ibsen and O'neill, it won't necessarily make us poorer financially but it won't make us richer culturally to miss out on classical works.

I also find Shirky's analysis in his blog on Carr offputting. He writes that he doesn't understand how somebody as seemingly knowledgeable on the medium he's writing about (technology) could end up being such a luddite. So does that mean that if someone was in war they should automatically like guns? If anything Carr has the authority to speak on the damaging qualities that he knows so well. Luckily, Shirky apologizes to him in a later blog post about other things, but not that. 

Conversely, I noticed that when I was reading about Shirky deciding to not allow his students to use technology during class, I found him to be quite a tolerant man. At first he put up with loads of interruptions until he realized it was no longer beneficial to let his pupils have their iphones on. He didn't want to deprive them initially, and wanted to give them the choice, and to have the discipline to police themselves but it didn't work! One other thing this makes me think of- I remember concerts in the 90's- you didn't see a sea of phone cameras across the Arena. I remember seeing a certain band and one of the few people that actually took a picture was escorted out of the premises. The rest were professionals.
Why do you need to watch live music on your phone while it's right in front of your face? I know why - because you're filming it so that you can say you were there.I'm not gonna say I haven't done it myself! But isn't being there enough? Isn't life great enough? Maybe we don't need to spend so much time documenting it and instead try to just enjoy it. Is that too much of a stretch?