… or a magazine, or newspaper, or even a web site with solid, informative text?
For me, it’s books. I have stacks throughout my house. In fact, many books remain in their bags because I love the touch, feel, and smell (mostly) of new books. And at the rate I’m going, these books will be in their bags for a very long time. (Damn the Borders coupon program.
Now to the point, I’m reading an interesting and thought-provoking book titled The Gutenberg Elegiesby Sven Birkets. Birkets muses about reading, writing, and culture in both traditional and today’s high tech world. He asks a question that I often obsess over: “What is the place of reading and of the reading sensibility in our culture as it has become?”
He goes on to say: “Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited. … The way that people experience the world has altered more in the last fifty years than in the many centuries preceeding us.”
Wow, scary stuff. And the worst of it is, we have no way to evaluate or categorize these changes because of the speed with which they are occurring.
One change I dare to put on the table is that people are reading less, and younger generations are reading even less than that. What does this mean? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? How will society change? In what new ways will our culture evolve?
Friends, all I have is questions. Thanks to Mr. Birkerts to attempting to pose some answers.