FOR well over a decade now, the death of the print industry, whether journalism or book publishing, has been trumpeted to all and sundry. It seems that Alena Graedon has taken this to heart, because her first novel, The Word Exchange, is all about how at long last, the printed word is dead and buried, with all manner of fiendish dance routines performed on its unmarked grave.

Our protagonist, Anana, works with a group of bibliophiles and lexicographers that publishes the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL). Said group is headed by her father, Doug, a philologist of no small reputation, and includes one Bart, who in addition to being Doug’s protege, is also head-over-heels besotted with Anana. Oh. He’s also best friends with Max, Anana’s thoroughly unlikeable former paramour.

As the novel opens, we find that Doug has gone mysteriously missing, just days before the official launch of the NADEL. Not only has he disappeared without much of a trace, the only thing to which he has left any reference is the “Meme”, an innocuous smart-phone analogue. “Analogue” because the Meme is to the smartphones of today as a Ferrari would be to an Elizabethan hack-ney coach; it communicates with the brain through electronic signals, helping users order taxis, remember dates, find places to eat or things to buy, and so on. In other words, it’s the unholy spawn of Apple, Facebook, Über, Google, Yelp!, WebMD, Wikipedia and Amazon, all rolled into one.

The first whiff of this technological brimstone wafts through the air when, as she hunts for her father, Anana encounters a mysterious group called “The International Diachronic Society”, the members of which vehemently oppose the Meme (and many other forms of technology). They do so for fear that the Meme and usage of its many tools physically changes the brain by rerouting neurons; and that this in turn, is dumbing people down, making Meme users incapable of reading or communicating without resorting to tools such as the Word Exchange.

This is where things start getting interesting. You see, the Word Exchange is an online database of (as you may well imagine) words and definitions; for the extremely reasonable price of two cents per word, it will supply users with a lexicon of terms, recommended conversational gambits, and definitions of things that you might otherwise have to look up. An amalgamation of previously printed dictionaries, thesauri and the like, the Word Exchange is owned by the very same company that manufactures the Meme: Synchronic. Corporate greed and human laziness are potent ingredients in the cocktail that Synchronic seems to be whipping up, but the little umbrella-on-a-stick that graces this beverage is the horde of Meme users who are so reliant on their little helpers that many get microchip implants to interface with the Meme more closely.

With people — literally — incapable of thinking for themselves, Synchronic is clearly poised to make mega-bucks on a scale that would have investment bankers running to their therapists for performance anxiety issues. And let’s be honest — when has profitability ever not trumped anything else? There is, however, more at stake here than just monopolistic ownership of language and that is concomitant revenue streams. Synchronic is launching the Nautilus, an upgraded version of the Meme, which interfaces with the human brain directly (yes Dorothy, we’re talking icky, skull-drilling electrodes and all, here). But in case there were any doubts about the organisation’s intentions, it has also acquired a startup game-maker that encourages Meme users to create “new” words (self-defining them), for incorporation into the Word Exchange.

The logic is that by flooding the Word Exchange with dissociative language, where there’s no common “base”, users will have to keep paying more and more money to Synchronic just to have a basic conversation. On its own, this would probably seem pretty dire to any philologist, but things are further complicated by the emergence of a strange illness: “Word Flu”, which causes people to slip into aphasic gibberish and eventually leads to death. Soon, we discover, most people are speaking utter tosh (think hashtag-based conversations, only even less comprehensible), and the planet is on the verge of a meltdown.

In the midst of all this comes Graedon’s heroine, Anana, who is brave but not terribly clever. It’s not unreasonable to expect that between the stresses of losing both her boyfriend (metaphorical), her father (literal) and her faculties (allegorical), Anana may not be the brightest bulb in the great chandelier of life, but there are moments when you may wonder just why Graedon has made her protagonist so utterly benighted. Some chapters in The Word Exchange make you feel like you’re in the middle of a slasher-flick, as Anana obtusely wanders off into dark corridors, checks her Meme despite the almost guaranteed damage it can do to her mind, and challenges creepy-as-hell Russian villains. Conversely, Bart the Super-Word-Nerd is kind of a delight. Brainy and articulate, he seems to have taken on all the traits one would hope to have in a hero, albeit one with an inordinate grounding in German philosophy (this will make sense, honest). Witty and self-effacing, he manages to occupy a middle-ground between Doug, who is effectively a total Luddite and Max, whose obsession with the future implies that any sacrifice is worth technological progress. And money, ideally the kind that has a cartoon duck diving into pools of the stuff.

On a macro level, you could see The Word Exchange as the lengthy posit of a very basic question: “is the internet making us stupid?” Graedon takes the concept of the smart-phone as the ubiquitous replacement for all technology and spins it into a careening, madly swerving tale of evil corporations, science run amuck, and the overwhelming stupidity of the human race, members of which will both (1) do anything to make a buck, and (2) pay a reasonably tiny amount to avoid minuscule expenditures of energy. But this is hardly surprising. The internet, as described by comedian John Oliver, is basically an “electronic cat [pictures] database”, and it barely takes a few minutes of perusing hyperbolic comments at the end of any news piece to understand why any newcomer to the World Wide Web would assume that we’re a species comprised solely of idiots.

Graedon, were I feeling uncharitable, seems to be quite wedded to this assumption, because despite its considerable linguistic sophistication, her novel is pretty blunt in its message. Very simply put, reading good, technology bad. Effort good, shortcuts bad. The Word Exchange can start to feel a little preachy by the time you reach its end, but the truth is that if you’re reading this review, you’re probably also the sort of person who recognises the fundamental power of words, of books, and of reading ... in which case, go and buy a copy at once.

The Word Exchange

(NOVEL)

By Alena Graedon

Doubleday, US

ISBN 978-0385537650

384pp.