In a world ruled by the Internet, are nonfiction books really necessary?

A 19-year-old Harvard sophomore is paid half a million dollars for a novel about a young woman who wants to go to Harvard—and the book turns out to include passages lifted from other writers’ novels. The National Security Agency (NSA) attempts to collect information on every phone call made in America. My wife, who teaches at a state university, reports that she and her colleagues must keep reminding their students that merely cruising the Internet and downloading information is not research. What do these vignettes have in common? They’re all examples of the misuse of electronic technology.

We’re struggling to understand the legal, cultural, and ethical implications of the ubiquitous Internet. The Web is equally a verbal conversation and a repository of countless written materials—and the consequences of that combination are potentially hazardous. Let’s say I go to a party and hear something interesting. I may pass it along to a friend, perhaps with an attribution, but maybe not. That’s how ideas, phrases, and names enter the conversational stream. Indeed, some 30 years ago, the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins named these shared bits of information “memes” and launched an entire academic discipline devoted to how they are created and exchanged.

When Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976) was published, digital transmission did something new in the meme sphere. It created a form of communication in which, essentially, speech took the place of writing. There’s a big difference between simply repeating a joke you heard yesterday and posting it to an electronic discussion list, where a stranger picks it up in a Google search and adds it to his blog. It’s all the froth of conversation, right? During the Second World War, our government opened envelopes, monitoring and censoring mail. How is that different from the NSA monitoring who calls whom? Now that voice transmission is digital data (and so is written transmission), what exactly is the difference between speaking and writing?

All of this gets to the heart of what we have to accomplish in nonfiction for young people. If the Internet is the current in which they are surfing, then nonfiction books are the rudder. They are expressly not part of the stream. Nonfiction resists and guides the rush of information by presenting something highly personal: an argument, a story, a contention. The Internet provides an insufferable amount of data, but nonfiction books have a great advantage. They offer distilled wisdom, refined thought, personal expression. They are models.

But models of what? I have a problem with the ever-repeated claim that good nonfiction “reads like a novel.” If you buy that argument, nonfiction is just another kind of storytelling. Storytelling does count, but the best nonfiction not only echoes the pulse-pounding narrative of a saga, it offers the clarity of a mathematical formula. Nonfiction is engineering. It builds a bridge from the world the reader knows to another shore.

A table of contents differs from a home page precisely because it presents the outline of an argument. That narrative logic is the backbone of any nonfiction book. It is (or should be) laid out as precisely as the sentences of an expository paragraph. Someday, I’d love to see someone praise a book for the impeccable sequence of its table of contents. Far beyond the contents of that book, the author would be offering young readers the best tool for navigating amidst the froth.