created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
tags: Reading
“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net,” said Pratchett, “there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”
What Pratchett and Sagan prophesized, however, was a coming tumultuousness, not an end of history but rather the demise of truth. Less of a computer revolution than a computer apocalypse.
Sven Birkerts’s damning The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: seeing in the denigration of physical books an irreparable harm.
“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority,” writes Birkerts. “More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.”
a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
rel:Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love
A printed book is a living animal with flesh of paper and ink of blood, so that compared to turning pages, mere scrolling is anemic.
NOTE
The internet as spirit, the book as body (text says this is false)
The internet is, regardless of the encomiums of its most fervent supporters, also a physical realm. Despite being composed of silicon and copper, soldering and circuit boards, the internet is still described as an ethereal, disembodied, spiritual realm.
Books are not mired in the cacophony of the internet.
Thought
This thought keeps on coming, a return to single, dedicated use objects - reading with a book that only does book things, a watch that just tells time, the film in the theater with no ability to minimize or pause, the live concert that carries on without you, the camera that takes a single photo.
In place of the phone, which promises to do it all.