Monday, January 29, 2007
death to books as we know them
print/paper books are static in form. For novels this may be OK, but for other content they become outdated the moment new information about the topic is discovered. E-books can constantly be updated, corrected, and reintroduced to the readership. This type of communication is natural to humans. You can't respond to the author of a print text. You can only respond to the text itself; in this case, a static, nonliving object. When working with e-text/e-books, the author can be directly contacted and is given the opportunity to respond and engage with their reader in a natural conversational manner. Technology is only now catching up with our natural tendencies when communicating. Socrates hated the idea of a permanent scroll because language and the ideas they create are constantly in flux. He believed long ago that books would kill the essence of language. What do you think?
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1 comment:
I like how you separated novels from other text that can be changed, updated, responded to... I agree that it is our natural human tendency to dive into a topic that interests us until we are surrounded by it. We want to interact with others who share the same interests so we can learn and teach. Books can do this to an extent, but web/electronic texts can take us further.
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