A Friday Fun Video – For Neo-Luddites
March 12, 2010
It’s Friday, which means I’ve spent almost an hour in bed this morning with a mug of French Roast and two newspapers. With newsprint still on my Neo-Luddite* fingertips, I alert you to this Onion video and a look at the lighter side of the continuing debate on print vs. online newspapers:
* “Neo-Luddite” is a term I just learned from Wikipedia. I’m not really one, of course (or why would I be blogging?) but I do believe I’d be better off with less Internet…must log off and get some writing done…
iEvolve?
January 28, 2010
On Tuesday, two mornings before its month-long, complimentary weekly delivery campaign was due to end, the Globe and Mail called to ask if I’d be willing to upgrade my current Friday-Saturday subscription to the full week. I was torn. On Wednesday, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad. Today, Thursday, I wonder if one day—sooner than later—this iPad will be the solution to my angst.
Okay, lukewarm angst. I don’t (yet) feel especially guilty for receiving my weekend paper in hard copy. I like holding that newspaper in my hands. Yes, it’s the product of dead trees. But does it really matter, if I recycle? My more environmentally-aware friends will tell me yes, I’m sure. But I don’t feel bad about my “paper paper.” I really don’t.
Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the issue of dead trees. Let’s talk about dead newspapers. I care about newspapers. While I think blogs are great (obviously, or I wouldn’t have started my own), they’re not newspapers. “Citizen journalism” may be journalism—no doubt undergrads in communications programs still debate this—but 99 percent of the time, they’re just opinions with links to news organizations. It’s organizations like the Globe that can do in-depth series on the emergence of China or the issues of mental health.
But, my tree-hugging friends say, you can support the newspapers you like by paying for their digital content. True. The Globe doesn’t charge for this yet but who knows how long this will last? The New York Times is now demanding money for its digital version.
Speaking of dead or dying things, consider the age of the majority of hard copy news readers. According to an article I recently read (in the kind of magazine with pages you have to turn) it’s people of my generation—I’m a boomer—and older who are the major consumers of print newspapers. The generations below us are happier getting their news online. Once we’re gone—in fact, likely long before we’re gone—paper papers will be old news, so to speak.
I’m not dead yet, and I’m not going to stop getting that bundle of newsprint delivered to my front door anytime soon. But earlier today, when the Globe called back for my final decision, I declined the Monday-Thursday addition to my subscription. I didn’t have time to read half the pages in them and throwing that unread half into the recycling bin just felt plain wrong.
And I have to admit that this morning, as I was reading all about the iPad in my last free issue of a Thursday Globe, I kept imagining what it would be like to be reading the same content on an electronic device…it might work…it’s possible I could learn to like it better…iEvolve?
Read any good ebooks lately?
November 14, 2009
People have been talking about ebooks for a long time. Even ten years ago, you’d have had a difficult time finding anyone who believed that ebooks weren’t going to revolutionize the worlds of reading, writing and publishing. But guess what? Ebooks haven’t happened. Not yet. Not really. Because a lot of us love books. Like me, for instance. I just have never been able to picture myself snuggling up in front of a fire with a mug of tea in one hand and an electronic device in the other.
But recently, I held a Kindle. (This is not such a big deal in a lot of countries, but it is here in Canada, where, as I write this, the Kindle is not yet available.) And I have to say I was captivated by it. Maybe it was partly the thrill of the ‘forbidden’—once Kindles are hanging on a rack beside the checkout at the neighbourhood Walmart, they won’t be nearly as interesting. But I felt…power. All the novels I could store on it! Every book Dickens, Chandler & Atwood ever wrote! And I could take them all with me wherever I went!
The scene of this Kindle-fest was a publishing “unconference”, bookcamp Vancouver. Besides the guy who’d picked up the Kindle on a recent trip to the U.S. and was now kindly allowing a group of attendees to pass it around, was a guy letting people fondle his Sony Reader. Sony Readers are available here in Canada; at the moment, they’re selling for $259 plus tax. I’m not going to buy one. Not yet, anyway. If I could buy an electronic reader of some kind for fifty bucks? I dunno, I was thinking as I handed the Kindle back. I still like to turn real pages.
I teach a course in critical reading at University of Victoria, Division of Continuing Studies. I use the first chapter of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson, as one of the texts to examine, and in my last class a student drew our attention to Atkinson’s appropriation of the opening of Tristram Shandy. I knew this but had become fuzzy on the details—the first and last time I read Shandy was in the 1970s—so I went home and did some research. Google and Amazon led me to 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley, in which Smiley discusses exactly what I was looking for.
Here’s the thing: I own 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. The book sits on a shelf in my office. I could reach that book without getting out of my chair. But I didn’t. Reach for the “real” book, that is. Because Amazon’s look-inside-the-book feature together with a search term took me right to the page I wanted and that was easier than leafing through the paper pages an arm’s length away.
And I had one of those “moments”. I realized that I’d crossed some sort of threshold, and that, for me, the revolution is coming.
(As it turns out, Atkinson nudge-wink acknowledges her debt to Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, with a reference to “the Reverend Sterne’s quill” on page two of Museum. Of course. How did I forget that?)
