Two Steps Forward . . . Too Many to Go Back?

By: Dawn Lauer, PepperDigital

According to the WSJ’s “On the Road” column, more and more smart phone carriers will have their noses in their phones – not their books.

This is thanks to new digital technology that allows you to read an entire novel, yes, book on an iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. In today’s world, there’s no doubt that convenience is king, but I can’t help but to wonder if, with the advent of the digital age, there is such a thing as going too far.

While I’m all for the latest and greatest and happen to be a consumer of most of it myself, as a mother of (soon-to-be) two children, I find myself constantly thinking decades ahead when it comes to the products we use now and how radically they will be considered obsolete in the future.

I also fear that as a society, we may be unintentionally robbing our children and generations to come of classic pastimes, like reading an actual book, flipping through the pages of a newspaper or even balancing a checkbook. I know that with technology also comes great change, but is there a risk of losing necessary traditions?

Take censorship for instance.

Novels like Tom Sawyer and The Scarlet Letter, classics that my entire English curriculum was based upon, have been deemed "inappropriate" for children in many schools.

Now, we are fostering a generation where paperback books may not even exist, and the simple pleasure of earmarking worn pages and highlighting exceptional verses may be just a thing of the past. The vision of my children sitting on a beach with their required summer reading on their iPhones, while texting their friends with the latest gossip, is one that I just can’t wrap my mind around yet.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking, but, although I embrace change, I hope it doesn’t carry that heavy a price.

Some things were just meant to stay the same. That’s why we call them the “classics.”

Comments

[Sam Ford]

It's hard to say, isn't it, Dawn, when something has gone too far? I think there's something to the visceral nature of holding a book, highlighting pages, and so on. It's one of the reasons I feel the physical newspaper has not been displaced, why there are still so many books on the subway, etc.

After all, books, DVD sets, etc., are more than just media. They are physical objects, and there's a certain status to having books on your shelf, DVDs in a collection, etc. We are living in a pack rat culture, especially in the U.S., where I think the collector in us means that these new technologies won't mean "the death of the book."

We talked about this often in journalism school, from those who feared everything would change. And much of it will. My students are reading essays in PDFs, and there are increasingly ways to annotate online. That's great for the environment, considering all the negative attributes to all the paper our society uses.

But I don't think that means the printed word will suddenly disappear. Mobile devices have their pleasures, whether they are the Amazon Kindle or the iPhone. There is some convenience with reading on those screens. But there are also issues of scale that can't easily be overcome, especially not to the point that a device that fits in your pocket will become a replacement for books.

Often, when a new technology comes along, there are two responses, one utopian and one dystopian. The utopian response is that society will be liberated by this new technology, that literacy issues will be solved and people will read more than ever before, etc. In short, all the world's problems will be solved by this new eBook. The dystopian response is that society will crumble because this new technology will cause people to read in short bursts instead of long ones. People will abandon the book, we'll all become chained to these portable devices and stop communicating, etc., etc.

Of course, neither of these extremes are true, because of one fundamental fact they both ignore: technology does not shape society. Rather, each of us chooses how that technology is beneficial to us, and how it's not.

I'm not convinced at all that all the reasons people use the physical printed word will be replaced by online technologies, at least not in the near or even distant future...