But just try
sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.
6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
but check this out:
[Nietzsche quote]
> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25