Dumbing down.
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I am well familiar with the internet and use it. I remain in the camp of those who prefer the tangible.
The same goes for letter writing.
Throughout the 1980s my lifelong friendships were formed via pen and ink correspondence, before technology made SPEED the main criterion of everything and the principal virtue of all human communication. (And yes, the internet will serve socialism with regard to distribution of goods and swiftly-required information).
I used to write pages and pages, and often hold a letter back to add more the day after. Thought would be behind every line, with rereading and corrections. I would illustrate my letters too.
I learned discipline in language and how also to pun and play with language.
Contrasting this with the internet, I find myself rushed all the time, constantly apologising for harsh words sent in a hurry, unwilling to write at length by email, which involves being at a screen, and preferring the old days – pen and ink whilst sipping in a Parisian cafe, drawing, rereading and writing without panic, without any need to rush.It strikes me that life in socialism would be more like that, without the mad hustle, bustle and impatience of capitalism’s crazy rushing of us all at speed to nowhere.
It seems to me that it is being forgotten that in socialism we won’t be proles any more, but free humans. We won’t have to be in front of screens all the time, frantically tapping away.
In socialism you will be able to have a smartphone or other device with a screen the size of a book on which you can read exact copies of the Book of Kells and Morris’s edition of Thomas More’s Utopia as you sit in a cafe in Paris. Everybody will be, not just scholars in some specialist library and having to wear white gloves.
No thanks. I’ll have the Burns & Oates edition of More and a decent hardback one of Kells. I don’t want a screen; nor do I want an unwieldy original.
I hope you will wear white gloves for handling fragile originals, and that these will still be preserved.
And why do you automatically think of a device rather than a printed book for leisurely reading? I don’t.
Two extremes: digital device vs artisanal de luxe tome. What’s wrong with a Penguin?I must say that I don’t think you ever loved books or saw them as anything other than text. Many of my books are old friends. I have a history with them. Few are de luxe. They’ve taken some knocks. They’ve shared life with me.
A well-made paperback or pocket hardback can be a beautiful thing, comfortable and portable too. What personality is there in a digital device? It suits those for whom there is but text alone. A paperback is more convenient too, for index-checking, pausing, and rereading parts. You can even write in the margins. So why should I have to choose between extremes?You have completely missed my point. Which was not that digital books are better than paper ones but that digital devices could allow millions of people access to exact copies in all details of editions of books that they can’t in that form in any other way. The same applies to paintings.
I’d have thought you’d would have welcomed a technological advance that enabled more widespread access to things you consider aesthetic in a form that reproduced not just the text but the way it was presented.
I prefer to read books in paper form but my preferences are as irrelevant and as boring as yours.
They can have beautiful illustrated paper editions and facsimile editions of the originals. Millions can have access to printed books, like they do now, but without money prohibiting access.
Those who are satisfied with screens/devices can have them – WITHOUT TODAY’S TALK of making paper extinct!And no one’s preferences should be irrelevant! Socialism is as much mine as yours. It will be everyone’s society.
Just couldn’t resist a put down, could you? We should rename the website “In yer face, comrade.org”
Pre-digital printing did involve a lot of skills which have now disappeared
I recall printing was the trade my father tried to steer me into as it was well-paid and more or less a protected union closed-shop.
If i had followed his advice, i would have been soon made redundant as computerisation of the industry soon occurred and i have met many ex-printers and book-binders over the years.
As for the art of letter-writing Facebook has replaced keeping in contact with friends and family and is far more effective a medium
far more effective a medium…
For shallow contact between semi-anonymous acquaintances in the hundreds. We obviously view friendship very differently.
See #216153
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