Burn all the books! January 17, 2007

This post comes as a reaction to personal observations of the way the role of the book is changing as a mass communication vehicle.  First off, the title is not a directive to start pouring the gasoline.  I preform neck-wrenching contortions to avoid breaking the spines on my paperbacks.  Rather, it is a personal adaption of Marshall McLuhan’s use of hot and cold to differentiate different kinds of media.   As this is a blog, I will not be apealing to any particular scientific evidence to support my ideas.  I did take a small pole, and 100% of those asked agreed with me.   Although, I must say, I normally have little difficulty convincing myself that I am right.   Anyway . . .  McLuhan rates media on a bidirectional scale where the degree of thinking and attention that must be given to the media determines how hot it is.  Books require one to “immerse onesself” and are therfore hot.  That’s where my title comes in.  In my humble–but decidely correct–opinion, hot media are going up in smoke as the attention span of each succeding generation slowly approaches zero.   To be melodramatic and decidedly sterotypical, if it weren’t for Harry Potter, kids these days wouldn’t be reading anything these days except the adds on the Froot-Loops box.   I used to read, back when I had far more time and far less accesible friends, between 2 to 3 books a week.  Now that online fantasy hockey has gobbled up my spare time like the procrastination monster from purgatory, I maybe get through one or two a month.  I don’t think I am alone.  In fact I know I am not as I was 1 of 4 in a class of 65 last Wednesday who admitted affiliation with the bibliophiles.   In my opinion, instead of spending focused time on a single activity,  people are increasingly likely to spend there time doing lots of low attention activities at the same time.  One can peruse a chat room, at the same time as writing an email, watching T.V., and text voting for the next American Idol.  Unfortunatley, for those of us who like to focus on one thing at a time, this is very annoying to watch.  This “trend” devalues a book at least as far as it’s entertainment value is concerned as why would anyone want to do one thing when 5 other fun things could be done in the same timeframe.  Books in a university setting are unappealing as they are just plain expensive.  One of my courses has an online text-book at no apparent cost to me other than the paper if I chose to print it.  Even though my love of books has me toting about physics manuals for years, I must admit that a digital format at least for informational is vastly superior to it’s bulky, slow reference counter-part.  So for anyone who has actually made it through to this conclusion without losing interest, I have no conclusion.  Hot media can burn in hell is the logical assumption, but as I am not willing to go there to read my coveted stories. . . Cool media is . . . well cool I guess.  I’ll stop now before I hurt myself.