The exact same concern applies to money and a gold standard.
Literally hard documentation resists corruption, manipulation, and entropy.
Yeh, but those things are kinda shitty anyway.
A column written by freelance writer J. P. Devine brought me back to this thread. It was in today’s edition of the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, Maine as well as the Morning Sentinel in Waterville (further north). His wife received a Nook as a gift for Christmas. He said that he missed the comforting sound of his wife flipping the pages of a book. J. P. Devine is also a movie reviewer.
kjonline.com/news/nook–read … 02-01.html
onlinesentinel.com/news/nook … 02-01.html
Here are some links to some of J. P. Devine’s columns.
onlinesentinel.com/contact/JP_Devine.html
And here is his column about his experience with Facebook:
kjonline.com/news/omg_-do-yo … 10-05.html
Also related to the subject of books, public libraries are having problems getting patrons to return books. One librarian was desperate enough to call the police.
You’re more right than you know, Trevor. Books are false by their very nature. Truth comes in a stream, and is castrated by being encased in endpapers and bound up in leather. The most shameless lies in history have been masqueraded as facts on the virtues (or should I say VICES) of their covers, while real truth is stifled and hushed up wherever brave men have dared to speak it.
The way things are going with tech, books made of paper or skin are becoming more valuable in some ways, if you know where and whats of the literary world.
I consider most books as psychological spam.
Almost all forms of entertainment are a waste of time.
Sometimes we get tired of learning and growing, then entertainment is refreshing,
but it’s not what we should live on.
Book content is also effected by demand. There is little demand for the finest of things. Demand centers around what the democratic mob wants. Their taste is hit and miss. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is poor.
For me it’s still much quicker – if your at your bookshelf-- to go pick up a book, and instantly flip to the tabbed sticker and read the highlighted areas and notes written in the book. I feel as though there is more room for active reading (highlighting, stickers, marginal note taking). Active reading the best way to learn while reading. I have a Kindle, too. I use it for fluent leisurely reading. However,the harder more academic readings require, for me, the physical copies. Nevertheless, even when I read a great book that’s easily readable, I still want a hard copy. I read that, I want it on my shelf, it’s now part of my soul and I never want to forget what ideas are contained in it. It’s easier to remember it if It’s on my shelf, visible, and organized chronologically.
Allan Bloom wrote about the decline of the american mind. How students aren’t prepared to think critically, and are no longer taking books on the train or on the bus anymore. Books aren’t our companions. Instead we are going iCrazy over internet enabled devices that give instant gratification. In one spot Bloom writes about a student entering a museum, and then how that student is bored because the student’s own soul isn’t receptive to the great artistic genius that surrounds him/her. Instead, we seek vulgar pleasures and dytharambic music that corrupt our souls. So he takes a Platonic view on beauty, and the careful nurturance of youth.
I don’t think the internet content and iphones are corrupting us. I think they make the disease we have more obvious. The disease, I think, is a natural lack of complete purpose. I’m on a mission. I have a purpose. Meanwhile, religion has monopolized purpose, and spoiled it. The secular world doesn’t care allot about purpose, also. It doesn’t offer a big alternative. It just wants your cash.
Hello Dan,
That’s an interesting point. I agree with how a purpose, a passionate commitment, can move and summon us. However, when we find that our habits have become more like addictions, we might be unconsciously making life of purpose denying choices that have been reinforced for such a long time that one has to ask, “what will break me free from this”? Isn’t this internet content and iPhone craze itself a type of platonic shadow in the bowels of a cave? Might we be too distracted to notice the point and purpose of life-- that life has a point-- if we are too busy meddling in the floxam and jetsam of perceived reality contained within these devices?
I think you make a good point about purpose, but the point is that these internet enabled devices, without a nurturing parental supervisor, may form into a habit, and then into an addiction which would prevent learning for mere entertainment. One would never find an authentic purpose if so ingrained in such a vulgar reality maybe? What do you think?
If there were no books, no one would have a reason to include a library when they make a draft of the house plans. No need to make a space for the beautifully bound “The Greatest Books Ever Written” or other similar collections.
eastonpressbooks.com/leather … ?code=0001
And the bookbinders would need to find something else to do for a living.
Yea and that makes many of my 6000 books more valuable. A library in homes are now game rooms.
A sign of the times. We are becoming more like children, wrapped in the garbs of our adolescence. The more garbage we put in the garden the more ignoble growths there will be. The history of great ideas, that might be best taught through books, is how humanity has reflected and nourished the mind. Going to the Henry Ford Museum, one can see how the family room has changed. The stove or the table use to be the center of the house, then the radio, then the television. However, now it’s in your living room, its in your office, its on your lap or even in your pocket, Screens are everywhere. They can shorten one’s attention span, they can provide any worthless fact, it can provide one with a plethora of p0rn; what else does one need to live one’s life in the bowels of that Platonic cave? Humanity has found something so attractive that it’s power it has over us acts as that “one Ring that rules them all”.
The greatest threat to democracy is distraction. We have become ever more efficient at providing habits that become addictions. Theseus coming out of the labyrinth, fly coming out of the bottle, old man who arises out of the cave are all stories that a culture shares to help them through that cultures struggles. Neo exiting the Matrix, the world of screens, is ours. Unfortunately, we can’t just jack in and learn kong fu, nor do we learn Plato or Wittengenstein that way either.
The only purpose of such collections is an attempt by the people who buy them to make themselves look intellectual. In a perfect world - people would wake up and realise how silly this is. In reality, people will probably keep buying expensively bound books in the hopes that people will think more highly of them.
You seem to be reminiscing about a time when every person was instructed in ‘the history of great ideas’. Blue remembered hills?
As I said earlier on the thread, I think people read more books than ever now. When I get on a train, most people are reading. When I talk to my friends, they all have books on the go. The generation above my generation, in my experience, tends to read less than my generation when they were young. I think a lot of older people mistake their own lack of reading for other peoples’ lack of reading.
I don’t have a lot of respect for the older generations. I find them badly educated, poorly read and stubborn. Many don’t understand the basics of politics and are easily led by poorly written news articles to believe all kinds of falsities, for example about the EU, immigrants etc. Not all, obviously, I know many incredibly sharp minded over 40s, but as a group I think they have been superseded by the politically aware, sharp, well read youth of today.
Quantity vs. quality. Reading more does not mean quality input.
This is probably one of the best posts I’ve read on ILP in a while.
=D>
Sorry to ad-hom, but weren’t you just talking about your 6000 books?
This thread is, basically, one large accusation that in general, people nowadays read less. If you want to form a argument that what people read nowadays is somehow lower value than what people read, say, 50 years ago, I’d be willing to listen, although again I think you’d be completely wrong and that the actual opposite is true.
I like electronic texts when I’m reading something from beginning to end, then done with it. But for reference texts that I am constantly flipping back and forth between pages and looking things up, I far and away prefer actual books.
amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kind … /154606011
Oh yea, the top sellers are sooo deep
I don’t get your point. Because you don’t really have one. The thread is about how much people read. I said young people read more. Your counter point was that what they were ‘substituting quality for quantity’. Either you have a worthwhile justification for this belief, or its just a prejudice you hold. I think the latter is true - its just a prejudice. Now you may be half heatedly looking for some kind of ‘evidence’ for the belief, but it was initially formed, and is maintained by, prejudice. Just like the OP has a prejudicial belief that in the modern world people don’t read books.
The most normal reason people hold prejudices is to support belief in their own superiority, especially when this belief is unsupportable by actual evidence.
Did you look at that list?