From our reading, I’m quite surprised at the doomsday prophecies people seem to have concerning print media. Granted, I myself am a voracious reader so my view is probably quite skewed, but to me print media is not at all dead. If anything, the formats and places where people read is what’s changing. And though some may argue that easily digestible bite-sized snippets and articles are going to replace thought-provoking novels, I would bring up the point that for any given media, there will always be trash of some kind; no medium is without its rotten apples.

The article “Is print dead? (Is it really?)” by the enigmatic “Stephanie” brings up this debate, and I quite agree with its hypothesis – that though there is a heavy shift towards digital formats such as tablets and eReaders, there will always be a market for those who distrust the machine. That is, what can go wrong will go wrong; while these electronic innovations are quite convenient, the fact is they still require electricity, some amount of technical knowledge, and more effort still to highlight and annotate.

I tend towards the positive side of these arguments. People who equate a changing readership with some kind of impending cultural disaster don’t realize that their views have been echoed in so many ways over the course of history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s own writing against fiction writing. Sure, people today may have a little more ADHD when they’re reading, but they’re still reading, aren’t they?