We have always been a society that reads. Reading serves so many purposes such as
entertainment, to understand a concept, get information etc. Digital technology
has definitely changed our society’s experience of reading. It has changed our
experience by going digital. Digital meaning things have moved online. People
now use yahoo articles instead of a newspaper or facebook invites instead of
mailed invites and the list goes on. Information and resources are so readily available
that people can find something online in minutes rather than going to a library
and spending time driving there, and going through the books. The thing that
has been changed the most by the internet is fact that even books are now
online. Furthermore people are more into the tech gadgets and have used these
to access books and that’s what’s changing, the access point.
Thereare several people that have started to say that the written word is gone and
that everything will be online. Borges and I both believe that the written word
is not gone and libraries will never cease to exist. Borges explains that the
human race will be long gone before the libraries are gone. In the end all
types of books, articles, journals, magazines, newspapers may be available
online but there will still be the option of print in those mediums. The reason
print will never come to an end is because nothing can replace that feeling of
holding the actual text in one’s own hands.
But what about future generations who have never known the feeling of holding actual text in one’s own hands? If you’ve never experienced it, you don’t feel it as a loss. If the commercial Brittney pointed out in her post is any indication, we are already moving towards teaching children to read on digital devices. That means that a child’s first experience with text is not a physical book in his or her hands, but some kind of digitally mediated experience with the text. If we have a generation of children growing up without ever having experienced the feeling of a physical book, how will they understand the value of it? And once those of us who do understand the value are gone, what reason do future generations have to preserve something that they don’t see as important? I’m not saying this is going to happen overnight, but the shift is already starting, and it is a possibility if not a certainty that print media will go the way of microfilm, Beta machines, and cassette tapes.
I would question Sinead’s statement that “we have always been a society that reads” [my emphasis]. That may be true enough, depending on who “we” refers to. But historically, the majority of the population has been non-literate, and, even today, there are different levels of literacy. What are the implications of this?