My fan and internet friend Danny Bloom sent me a link to an interview he did about his latest passion: the difference between on-screen reading and reading from books.
Someone who works in technology wrote him and said he was fighting a losing battle, that paper is dead (though Danny isn’t saying we shouldn’t read on-screen, he’s just calling for someone, somewhere to give a proper scientific look and see if this affects our brains differently and whether we’re okay with this shift in cognition). Here’s what I wrote to Danny:
My partner watched An Inconvenient Truth last night. In it, Gore quotes someone as saying something along the lines of “It’s difficult to get a man to see sense when his income depends on him not seeing it.”
I’ve got a stack of e-books in my valise, printed out as real books, because I read real books differently — as more valuable, notable, lasting, and memorable than electronic information. Not to mention all those other factors like being able to feel your progress through the work and know how much is remaining, and it being so much easier on the eyes, and doing different things in the brain as you said in the article.
Sometimes I do feel a pang of guilt when I realise that the paper I’m using — even the recycled paper — had to come from somewhere, and putting the trimmings in the recycling doesn’t mean they magically turn into new paper with zero energy cost… But still… Books are nice. As that other article sent me said so beautifully, books are a perfect technology. Computer devices are still far from perfect.
I finished making these two books last night. What piece of electronic gear — even the iPad — will ever feel the same as opening a fresh new book? The iPad is a space already filled with demands, tentacles pulling you away to other people’s ideas and commercial intentions for you, whereas a blank book is your own, private, infinite imaginal space.
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