TORTA DI MELE E MASCARPONE
5 years ago
Thursday, March 19, 2009
More on Kindle
After posting the previous post, I went to the D2L news page and saw Judy had posted an article called "Resisting the Kindle" from The Atlantic. One interesting point the author points out is, as quoted, "My fear is that as Wikipedia is to information, so will the Kindle become to literature and the humanities: a one-stop outlet, a speedy and irresistibly efficient leveler of context." The author poses that the physical print book encompasses much more reality in reading than an electronic version. This said, he gave an example of someone trying to recall a sentence of a poem by Wallace Stevens but could not. So, they proceeded to Blackberry this inquiry and then accessed it. The author's fear, besides the previously addressed fear, is that no one will learn anymore... It will all be information floating and waiting for retrieval... Is this really where we're going? I use my iPhone for many things just for convenience when I don't have Internet access with my laptop, or to check stocks very quickly with one touch of a finger. But to search for a line of a poem, among other things, is pushing the limit.
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Actually, I've often googled lines/parts of poems to quickly find something that I couldn't quite remember -- or to locate a poem that I knew quite well but couldn't easily find on my bookshelves with their continually disintegrating organization. I've done this with long poems, short poems -- and actually with other literary genres too.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not seeing this as pushing the limit. I guess what a person searches for depends upon their usual interests. For instance, I find myself often checking imdb.com when my husband asks me how old an actor is, whether the actor is still alive, or who the actor's spouse/parents are. I did this just this week when Natasha Richardson died and my husband thought one of her siblings was Miranda. I went to imdb so that he could see who all Natasha's relatives were and could see that Miranda is from another Richardson family. He'd also forgotten that Liam Neeson was Natasha's husband and wondered how long they had been married -- like I would know that.
In any case, people search for whatever information they want. And some of us search for lines of poetry, quotes from plays, etc.