In his excellent book, Technopoly, Postman stresses the fact that we cannot view any one single new technology as an isolated event. Meaning you really have to view the media landscape as a sort of ecosystem. You cannot introduce or remove one single organism in an ecosystem without altering the entire structure. The whole ecosystem changes, reboots. This has consequences for all the remaining, or new, inhabitants. This is the way that media, in the sense of acquistion of information, exists. All new formats declare a total war on the established ones. The process of transition often goes unnoticed and unquestioned.

For example; the process of print upheaved the primordial way of learning – by memorizing, group teaching and hands-on instruction. Knowledge became something of a simulation and wisdom (which is a function of experience) took the back seat. After print came television that by its very nature stresses quick observation, emotions and singular effects over logic, reason and slow, individual and often difficult acquisition of knowledge. These last decades has seen an unholy fusion of all of these previous technologies into a midway solution: The computer. The computer however differs in one important respect. It is all these things at once: Individual, emotional, logical, massconceptual, both slow and infinately quick.

Changes in the media landscape can however be quicker than the odd 300 years of evolution described above. Media formats change almost yearly and each new format is indeed a soldier that wages war on the media battlefield; the extinction of one will have far-reaching effects on the others. These changes are perceptible because they happen often while the structural changes in how we learn are not as acutely felt as they creep through decades and centuries.

The printing process, has been remarkably resilient to changes, however. The printed word has been much the same in the last odd century or two although the speed of distribution certainly has accelerated. It is in this respect that the e-book reader is an interesting machine: because it targets that very principle of learning by way of print and infuses it with the accelerated, interrupted, shortcut learning of the computer. Any information, readily available, whenever. Cross-referenced, rated and itemized to a fault. My point is that even if printed knowledge has nothing to do with wisdom – used prudently, with consciousness, it can certainly lay the foundation for it. Wisdom precurses knowledge while knowledge precurses nothing. It simply is. It is an indifferent, amoral tool.

An e-book reader, while claiming to shorten your way to wisdom, runs the very real risk of in fact elongating it considerably. Too brash conclusions and too many shortcuts work against the afterthought needed for acquiring information, sorting through it. Especially in a world where one is constantly assaulted by an amount of information that leaves little room for process or a deeper afterthought. Too much energy is wasted on being everywhere, constantly having to reach decisions and at a lightning pace evaluate situations. Many of our timesaving devices are in fact time vampires.

Technology is a friend that we need to keep under close inspection. It is too good a friend to let fly without asking question. Scepsis is healthy. But more importantly, we need to put our charming, overzealous, technological prophets up against the wall; ask them if they have given any thought not only what inventions do, but also, what they undo – and how this affects us on a deeper level. This is prudent, moral and responsible. Anything else is moronic, selfdestructing blindness. We cannot end up being the tools of our tools. Worse yet, we are at risk of becoming tools who have all but ceased asking questions.