HAVE BOOKS BECOME DINOSAURS?

 

 

 

 

No, I am not going to talk about the ACADEMY AWARDS:

The people I want to win won't.  The speeches will go on too long.

I have a longer than usual attention-span, mind you, but staying up until
midnight for BEST PICTURE seems a bit too much.

In fact, increasingly, we are all like the one-year-old in the recent viral video
who seems to think a magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work.

As this video demonstrates, to a 1-year-old, Apple's iPad is something that's
literally been around all of their lives.

So rather than be amazed at all the things an iPad can do,
this child is confounded by what a paper magazine cannot do.
Makes sense, right?

Pretend it’s 15 years from now, and the 1-year-old in the video is a teenager.
What would you tell her about what reading in 2013 was like?

What aspects of reading now do you imagine
will be different then?

What will you miss?

Take a look at just a few new models to get your mind thinking,
 including Al Gore’s new book
in which a reader can blow on wind turbines to make them turn.

The three models in “The Future of the Book” video from IDEO;

 This collection of 21 e-books for children in which the periodic table
of the elements comes alive,

and the illustrations for Alice in Wonderland move around the page at the reader’s whim;

and some books with soundtracks.



I find it hard to imagine reading a novel like “Anna Karenina,” though,

and jumping away from the book every page or so to follow some hyperlink,

in part because it would end up taking a year (or years) to read.

 Is Google making us stupid?

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf,

a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and
the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

“We are how we read.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency”
and “immediacy” above all else,

may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading

that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press,
made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.”

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form
when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely
disengaged.

{NO DOGS ALLOWED sign from Spain}

 



Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese,

develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different
from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter.
His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become
exhausting and painful.

The typewriter rescued him for a time.

Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed,
using only the tips of his fingers.

Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

 But the machine had a subtler effect on his work.

One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing.
His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.

The friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work,
 his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media,
traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads,
and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles,
introduce capsule summaries,
and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.

This generation will cling to their reading, but what about their children
and grandchildren?

Will we readers end up looking like those elderly men who wear their waistlines
pulled up halfway to their armpits?

Are books of depth and length a thing of the past?

Are books which demand reflection and thought becoming
the modern dinosaurs?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
"A muscian must make music;
an artist must paint;
a poet must write,
if he is to be at peace with himself.
What a man can be, he must be."
- Abraham Maslow.
http://www.wattpad.com/12751302-love-in-the-time-of-the-undead