Book Worm or Computer Nerd?

Are we ready to say bye to books was the provocative title of a BBC article last Friday on Kindle DX, an e-reading device nearly as big as an A4 sheet of paper. After spending some time discussing how it will work and how much it will cost, the article never really gets round to answering its own question.

Dawn did a better job in her blog this week of weighing up the pros and cons. For her, it all boils down to a matter of choice – both/and thinking, not either/or. Although from the enthusiastic feel to her blog title – The Kindle is Reborn! – I think we can sense her positive vibes towards it.

All I want to do is quote a few relevant sentences from my main man Neil Postman. Yes, I know I’ve waxed lyrical about his stuff before. But, well, its my blog, frankly. Plus a want to give another perspective from the usual technophile one that dominates the internet.

“New technologies compete with old ones — for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that the medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool — the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision…

“In the United States, we can see such collisions everywhere — in politics, in religion, in commerce — but we see them most clearly in the schools, where two great technologies confront each other in uncompromising aspect for the control of students’ minds. On the one hand, there is the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline. On the other there is the world of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response. Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television. There, they encounter the world of the printed word. A sort of psychic battle takes place, and there are many casualties — children who can’t learn to read or won’t, children who cannot organize their thought into logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend to lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time. They are failures, but not because they are stupid. They are failures because there is a media war going on, and they are on the wrong side — at least for the moment.”

Think about it.