When I was in college many moons ago, someone told me that
he envisioned a future where there would be no libraries with paper-bound books
as we know them; everything would be electronic and computerized. Whether or
not that may happen completely, we are still a considerable way from that. For
one thing, the electronic “library” is dependent on electric and battery power;
for another, it is not quite the same reading experience. Scrolling is more
cumbersome than flipping a page, and you can’t easily skip ahead and return to
where you left off with a real book. Reading from an electronic screen can be
tiring and sometimes even nauseating; it is best digested in small bites. Some
people think e-books like the Kindle are “cool” and “hip,” and while they can
store hundreds of “books,” I frankly find this more of a concern if your
“e-book” goes on the blink and you lose your whole “library.”
Furthermore, a picture can say a thousand words (as the
saying goes), and for those who like pictures to go along with the words, an
e-book can be an especially dull snooze fest. Pictures generally take-up far
more memory and disk space than text; one high quality photograph can be as
much as 10 times or more larger than the text of, say, War and Peace (frankly, I suspect that you would more likely be
found on a chair with cobwebs on your bones if you actually attempted to read
an e-book version of that novel), so most e-books are drab, colorless print
that makes it difficult to jump back and forth to try to figure out what they
hell you just read was all about.
Take for example a book I recently added to my real library
collection entitled Lost Detroit: Stories
Behind the Motor City's Majestic Ruins. Back in the day when Detroit’s
automobile barons lived like kings, the city was peppered with magnificent
structures, many of which had a classical touch to them. But today, many of
those buildings have fallen into a sad state of decay. Lost Detroit provides a fascinating mix of photographs and
behind-the-scenes stories about structures like the old Cass Technical High
School, closed in 2005, but remains virtually as it was, with tables, chairs,
blackboards, books and school supplies still left as if only yesterday;
however, the ghosts of students passed
have apparently taken to rowdy behavior when the teachers all left. The Michigan and United Artists theaters were
stately pleasure palaces that now look like Miss Havisham’s dining room with
its rotting wedding cake.
The Michigan Central Station, according to a caption to one
the photographs, is “One of the most notorious abandoned landmarks in the
country, drawing thousands of curious visitors. To some, it is Detroit’s
version of the Rome’s Coliseum; to others, it is a shameful behemoth of
blight.” The main waiting room did indeed have self-consciously “Romanesque” features,
but where once served 4,000 people a day in comfort and splendor, it is now more
monument to the lack of appreciation of humanity’s grand dreams. Although it was deemed a “national historic
site,” in 2009 the city council sought to have it demolished, but this has been
delayed as there have several “proposals” to renovate it.
There are reasons for the ignominious downfall for these
ancient structures; the Detroit Urban Area, or Detroit and its suburbs, has a
population of 4.3 million people; yet the city itself has a population of a
little over 700,000—a remarkably small number. In 1950, the population of Detroit
was over 1.8 million, almost 60 percent of its metro area. The 2010 census
lists the city demographically comprising 82.7% black and only 10.6% white—almost
exactly the opposite of the suburbs. The effect of white flight: The per-capita
income in the city is less than half that of the suburbs. What this means is
that Detroit’s tax base has fallen dramatically not just in the number of tax
payers, but in the taxable income of those who are left. Not surprisingly, many
of those old buildings that defined a city’s grandeur no longer have the
clientele to maintain them.
This is the kind of world you can explore in a “real” book,
the kind of world than no electronic book can replicate. And so it is the
personal computer, whose “demise” as has been predicted since the advent of the
“smartphone” and “tablet.” To me, these are just “toys” that can make life
“simpler” for the on-the-go lifestyle. But you can’t really “create” anything
on one of these devices, and in the end, they makes things as much simple-minded
as simple. You can’t really compose anything meaningful on them, you can’t do
anything on them requires power and space. If you use them for any of these
purposes, you are not really serious about it.
Apple computers continue to sell because they still have the
“cool” and “hip” factor, but Microsoft-based computers are supposedly becoming
less so. The release of Windows 8 today is supposed to stem the slide by making
Windows-based PCs more compatible and interactive with smartphones and tablets.
For me, and I’m sure for many hardcore PC users, this new version of Windows is
a step-back in some respects, especially in the features that have been
removed—such as the DVD codecs for Media Player and DVD Maker; this may be due
to complaints from third-parties, but it shows that Microsoft has chosen to
ignore serious PC users and caved-in to the not-serious users.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but Stanley Kubrick obviously
could have used one when he made the film 2001:
Space Odyssey. Imaginations have clearly outpaced reality. But I look with trepidation
to a world where everything is reduced to its simplest form, that requires no
real thought or creation. It’s like a world I looked at in one of the old Mad
Magazine books they used to sell on Supermarket stands way back in the day:
People reduced to oversized ball-shapes with tiny heads and appendages attached
to them.
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