Good Morning: Written word appears to be first casualty in Internet takeover
I have recently been accused of being sarcastic, arrogant and even mean in some of my columns. I don’t think I will apologize. I will, however, take a slight reprieve from my usual tone because right now I am concerned. I have grown concerned with the future. Not in the way the "2012" conspirators want me to be, but because we have entered into a place hitherto unheard of in history. We do not read. The death of the newspapers has been harked and heralded since the dawn of the Internet. When people began to prefer scrolling a mouse to turning and folding a page, the first trumpets began to sound. But what about the books? Throughout history it has been the authors, poets, essayists and bards who have shaped their times as much as the rulers they so often punctured with their sharpened pens. Even leading into this century, the book was not discounted as being an old fashioned vessel for worn-out ideas, but as an important, if not as pivotal, podium for a treasured form of art. It was then that the Internet and it’s many disciples took first blood. It was online where the first rumors of books dying were pasted up for the masses. It was the bloggers and their kin who started the rumors that sparked the idea that books were doomed. They bought the gravestone and leaned a spade upon it. Then we come to this Kindle phenomenon. Here is one of the hundreds of products that web aficionados have created a supply for without a demand to guide them. I suppose I just don’t understand where the improvement lies. The written word, in the form in which it has been presented since we laid down the chisel and picked up the quill is nearly perfect. The pages turn as easily as a screen can change. The margins, if you feel like using them are free for notes, stars, or underlines. The book can be dropped, kicked and sat upon without the slightest worry of damage. The book doesn’t run out of battery. The more important issue in this whole war of words is that the language itself will change. Already, in journalism, it has changed the way stories have been written for many years. The language of the digital age is one which time is of the essence. The essence used to be the language itself. Why would people read when the words matter less than the speed of the writer’s fingers? My friends say that I’m like an old man. I suppose I am and that this may be just my war with the modern world. But I am an "old man" who can use Facebook. Out of the 39 friends online this morning, 28 told the world that they do not read books. I wonder if they’ll even read this.
