Screening versus reading: the debate goes on

QUESTION FROM SB: By your standards, anything that you type into this chat window is lesser—utterly useless by way of the medium. This suggests very strongly that we shouldn’t trust anything you say to the readers here. After all, it’s appearing through a screen. But isn’t it needlessly tendentious of you to judge a funny sentence lesser because it appears on a screen? A funny sentence is a funny sentence. The presentation of that sentence shouldn’t get in the way of its funny qualities.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh gosh, I’m not saying anything that appears on a screen is less interesting or useless—as I say in the piece, the reviews on Amazon (for instance) are fascinating. About the funny sentence by Benchley—what I said was (and I think this is actually an important point) that it’s funny in the paperback but not on the Kindle, because humor is sensitive to things like grayness and typographical infelicity—and then I say, at the end, that the same passage by Benchley is funny again on the iPod. So I’m not dismissing things because they exist on screens!