Reports of the novel's death are greatly exaggerated...

In the last couple of months I've read Michiko Kakutani's "Texts Without Context" NYT article and Laura Miller's "Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain" Salon.com article, which are thematically related riffs on how the Internet is destroying our culture.  


They make me wonder: <tongue-in-cheek>Didn't the printing press and widespread literacy destroy the oral tradition?  I like to think that society's storytellers took to the streets to declaim hysterical rants against the "book" and its deleterious effects on culture.  It even harmed the way we think, for people no longer needed to remember all of a story but could simply look it up in a book!  Worse, they choose by and large not to read (much less memorize) the Iliad, but these "novels" of highly questionable authorship (so many, especially the females, seem to write under assumed names) and value.</tongue-in-cheek>

But seriously, echoing Miller's concerns, what did we lose "socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically" when the majority decided that widespread literacy and the written word were superior to the oral tradition?  Are we in a worse place?  Oddly enough, I discovered Ursula Le Guin's "Off the Page: Loud Cows" essay in her the wave in the mind collection last night, which begins thus:

What happened to stories and poems after the invention of printing is a strange and terrible thing.  Literature lost its voice.  Except on the stage, and it was silenced.  Gutenberg muzzled us.

Despite this bleak beginning, Le Guin argues that ultimately, literature rediscovered its voice and (so I interpret) recapture some of the lost magic of the oral tradition.  This makes me hopeful, nay, almost certain, that the depth of the novel will not die completely, but be rediscovered, reborn, and cherished by a new generation of readers (another nagging question left unasked and unanswered by Miller's article: is there any part of the brain that is exercised by surfing the net, or does the whole thing go flaccid?  It would be nice to know if this is a tradeoff or a complete loss).

Of course, it took a few hundred years for the book to transform society, while it has taken movies, radio, television, and the internet only a few generations, so we feel the transition more acutely.  Frankly, I would say that the situation is in some ways better now, precisely because anyone can contribute to the soup, and we don't have to sit passively and eat what Doubleday/RKO/MGM et al think they can sell to us.  

With more direct access to potential customers over the internet, the number of comics have exploded.  You have a very good chance of coming across bad webcomics when browsing for something to read, but then again, you have a 100% chance of reading dogs like Blondie and Hagar the Horrible in the newspaper.  Would XKCD and Dinosaur Comics ever have made it in a print-only world?  No.  Are they demonstrably better than all but a few of the comics that run in newspapers?  Hell yes.

I don't think novelists have quite figured out how to sell their work through the new medium.  They're marketing themselves fairly effectively, but have yet to take control of the means of distribution.