Kindle me dumbly

Not that long ago I stumbled onto a blogpost by one of the leading (not my words) Swedish authorities on… Well. Everything digital really. He published a quick number on the future of readingpads, like Amazon’s Kindle, say. He prophecied that it would surely make the most wanted christmas gift of the 2010. But. What to expect from a tech savvy blog but evangelism, right?

My own reflection on the matter is that even if readingpads might become increasingly popular amongst certain groups, and for specific purposes – the whole idea of making it easy to annotate, reference, cross-reference and look up synonyms and the like – is actually contraproductive to the process of reading. And learning. Because even if the wired dictionary is Websters, say, and not the commonplace breedingground of disinformation, Wikipedia, it depends on the assumption that knowledge is better if speedily acquired. Lets say that you read a word, or a sentence, or a complete paragraph of thought that you don’t understand, or you don’t understand fully. On a readingpad, you simply look it up on your reference of choice and there you go. Presto. Finto. All that thinking has been done for you. You don’t go on reading, carefully paying attention to the material and crossreferencing it with your own knowledge and outlook on the world – and discover that eventually, the text starts to make sense to you. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe its a crap text. But again, you will have discovered that yourself. And anything that comes at a cost in infinately more worth that whatever has been too readily served to you.

Not even mentioning the fact that you don’t develop your own personality or view of the subject you have read, you will have simply scanned the most readily available sources, made a quiet poll in your head (if even that) and selected an opinion to adopt. Someone elses opinion. Now, I’m fully aware that analysis, critique and conscious thought require the sort of investment in time and level of attention that few folk have the audacity to go through. Nevertheless, here you go. If you recieve too many quick, given answers, your own tools for analysis and thought will suffer. Because adopting opinions has absolutely nothing to do with acquiring knowledge (sorry those of you too heavily invested in Social media, chances are you’re buying into the collective rumour scam).

Why are books so excellent? Because they exist on several planes: They can be given to a friend. You can spill coffee on them. You can lose them. You can sort them and stack them. But, most importantly, books, in the two dimensional form – do not give you the opportunity to cheat. You either understand it or you don’t. If you don’t, then you have the choice of furthering yourself into the material, forming questions (beginning to sound like science to you here?) and trying to understand. Or, you can give up. Decide that it wasn’t for you. And that choice, too, says something about you.

Many of our online, interactive and social inventions are fabulous, but they carry that same stink of lazy, moronic and careless acquisition of knowledge. We need time to reflect and form opinions. A human being needs that offline time to put words into perspectives. If all is given, then there truly is nothing to discover. But all is never given, it is just simply misrepresented. What you see in the dictionary is a mere summary of terms, what you read in Wikipedia is just a perfunctory glance (or just plain wrong – if you’re lucky, it won’t be a malign wrong). So, take advantage of all that wealth of information but do not succumb to the lazy process of adopting opinions. And most people do. Bloggers certainly do. Nothing spreads disinformation like bloggers (usually clad in lofty statements of “consumer power”). That, however is an entirely different matter.

The mental process of sorting knowledge takes time. By robbing readers of that time, we’re simply turning them into drones. Nothing more.

It can, of course, be argued that a readpad offers the same time for reflection as a book would (and that argument can be extented to the whole internet as a learning tool). But then again, why use one to begin with? Is portability really that important? How often do you read all of your books at once? Do you really want to use more screens for reading? Do you really want to talk to support staff when it doesn’t boot up? Isn’t it kind of cool not to have to use batteries to read?

I’m not saying that readpads don’t have their audiences or uses. They certainly do. The question is however if they improve on the actual content. My answer is no. This is the genius of the book. The format is uniquely adapted to the process of thinking. Don’t google it. Think it.