A year or so ago I wrote a post about how I felt that Twitter = the Devil. In that post I briefly lamented how, if things kept going the way they were (these were the heady days of “Web 2.0” don’t forget), that my children would never get to experience an actual library – that all of their future learning would be antiseptic and…well, bland.
My intention was to elicit some response in the reader, some empathy, some “kindling” of emotion, some visceral reaction to the idea that my children – OUR children – wouldn’t be able to sit in hallowed halls and leaf through tomes of great import, taking in the intoxicating effluvia rising from parchment and leather. I feared they wouldn’t be able to sit in revered and imposed silence (never is a whispered “Shhhh” more imposing) reading, studying, reveling in centuries-old tradition and protocol.
Part of the reason I have this fear is because many of the more enjoyable memories I have from my many years of college involve some of the more widely regarded university libraries in the country. These memories include spending time in “Special Collections” paging through first editions of masters such as Faulkner and Thoreau; surreptitiously occupying “study rooms” where I could relax and read in compounded seclusion and silence; partaking of the tangible, almost corporeal atmosphere that one actually feels upon walking through the doors into a world of great expectation, understanding, knowledge and influence; furtive dalliances with sprightly coeds while the likes of Keynes and Friedman or Hobbes and Kant looked down from lofty perches. All of these memories combined with the hundreds of others I’ve gathered in the last 40 years combined to what I perceived as one of the greatest slights and most tragic extinctions my children would ever experience: the loss of the library.
Then I got my Kindle 2.
Screw libraries - this device has ruined me forever. I can carry in my briefcase 1500 novels, philosophical treatises, historical references, magazines and more, while still referencing Wikipedia via a mobile browser and free-to-use 3G network (oh, yeah, and I can check hockey scores on The Hockey News as well) and listening to one of 500+ MP3s.
No more walking four flights of stairs with an armload of books, no more lugging a heavily-laden backpack through rain and sleet and snow, no more late fees, no more Mapplethorpe strewn restrooms, no more late night excursions to get that one quote from the one magazine that you need to find, again, in the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature but oh crap the periodical room is closed.Libraries? I welcome their demise! Now my greatest fear is that my children won’t get to experience Amazon, and that it, too, walks Spanish, just as the library has.
