The sentence and (on?) the online world -- from Librarian of Congress James H. Billington

Thought-provoking words from one of my grad school mentors on the disappearance of the sentence in our online world:

A quarter-century into his tenure, [James H. Billington, a former Princeton Russian history professor who is marking 25 years as the Librarian of Congress] still gets excited enough to leap out of his chair as he describes the library’s latest project, an effort to "bypass the whole education bureaucracy and get our cultural heritage out to kids in K-12 with an online history of America through song," a site that’s expected to be available around the end of this year.

Even as Billington has helped focus scholars, librarians, and readers around the world on the huge opportunities made available by the information revolution, he also has insisted that Americans think seriously about what we’re at risk of losing as we embrace new media. As readers move from reading printed books to zipping around the infinite library of the Web, Billington worries that the basic building block of our intellectual and cultural history — the sentence — is losing its central position. The library proudly announced in 2010 that it had acquired every public tweet tweeted since Twitter’s inception in March 2006 — billions of them, to be archived digitally — in a process still in the early stages. But at the same time, Billington wonders what communicating in 140-character blurts is doing to the ability of Americans to express themselves in linear fashion.

“Is the new technology moving us more toward plebiscite democracy?” he asks. “Are we losing representative government?

“Serious argument and discourse were made possible by the sentence,” he says. “Now, on chat rooms and Twitter, you have combinations of acronyms. I’m a big believer that conversations with mute authors of the past are better than the noise of debates filled with slogans or chat rooms filled with people who haven’t read anything. ...”

As readers’ attention spans shrink and Google’s algorithms take the place of human connection, Billington fears, “it may soon be as difficult to read a Dickens novel as it is for us now to read Beowulf.” 

--Marc Fisher ’80, "America’s soundtrack: As Librarian of Congress, James Billington ’50 safeguards treasured moments in U.S. culture," Princeton Alumni Weekly (November 14, 2012). Billington image from article, with caption: One of James Billington ’50’s duties as librarian of Congress is to safeguard national sound treasures. Standing outside his office — with its magnificent view of the Capitol — Billington breaks into song himself.

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Update: A propos of the sentence, this from Hemingway (via PR) in A Moveable Feast:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.