This is something I wanted to discuss in class, but we always seemed too busy working on our assigned stuff and I never found a good time to bring it up. So, this is the perfect place!
I heard this story on Morning Edition shortly before our class began. They are talking about the impact that the internet, Twitter, Kindel and other forms of electronic writing will have on the way we read and write in the future. Will we give up paper books? Will we loose our appreciation for colorful language in exchange for quick information? I would love to hear your comments.
Here is the link.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122026529&ps=rs
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ReplyDeleteHey guys. I don't have much time to write. I'm on a hotel computer and I think I'm using someone else's funds to pay for this internet. I did, however, wanted to comment on Pete's inquiry about the future usage of electronic books. I don't think paper bound books will ever become obsolete, just because they are so much more practical to use than those new iPads (or whatever they're called. What's going to happen when your electronic book runs out of battery? What about the glare the sun emits while reading in the park? What about a spontaneous rain? Oh no. I think conventional books are here to stay. I'll discuss more when I get back. I'm in San Francisco right now. It's awesome.
ReplyDeleteEnjoy San Fran Michael. Also, this is Tamara's post, not mine. She's raised an interesting subject that I like to talk about too.
ReplyDeleteI used to be pretty anti-e-book, but recently I am relaxing a lot more on technology. When we try to do anything . . . to read, to meet someone at the park, to create some art . . . we first have a motive and then we develop a method. The method is the kind of book we use, the route we take to the park, or the medium we might use to make art, painting, for instance. If we do something enough, reading, for instance, we tend to start combining the motive (to read) with the method (turning the pages of a paper book) together in our mind. If a different method is suggested, we tend to worry that someone if messing with our motive, i.e., if you want me to use a different kind of book, you want me to change my initial goal of reading.
In reading Tamara's NPR article on use of the e-book, however, I am reminded of the close link between motive and method, between what you want to do and how you do it. If we modify how we do things, our new motives of what we can do will, potentially, change. No new verbose and eloquent Thoreau will be born in this medium. Carr says in the article, more e-readers will mean a "retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page". This sounds true to me.
However, it's also true that a singular motive may be too simple to explain what brings us to text. In fact, the kind of reading we do in People magazine while we wait at the doctor's office is different from the reading that we do when we sit down to digest a textbook for class or a novel we really want to pour over. E-reading, if we can start calling it that, is a kind of reading for a kind of purpose -- journalistic, informational, or surface reading -- while print reading serves more contemplative motives.
The question can become a chicken-egg one though. It's certainly true that the kind of reading or thinking that a culture performs can change how that culture thinks and produces more text, so, the distribution of our time spent in reading from different media over the course of decades will affect the kinds of new texts we generate, and how we think about them, and, eventually, how we think in general.
I worry about it; I don't worry about it. It goes back and forth like the switch on a Kindle.
I plan on extending this thinking in a post later today linking one of the articles Tamara's article mentions to a piece I read last year.
Great post, Tam!