Since it was Celebration Sunday I watched some Portlandia on the ride back to NYC, then did some reading. I just got my iPad mini a couple of weeks ago, and I am conflicted about admitting this but - I'm starting to prefer it to reading books in ye olde traditional manner because of the perks if offers. I know I can highlight and bookmark a physical book too, but I can't tap a word to automatically get its definition or seamlessly go to Wikipedia to learn more about a word/event/person. Those amenities are pretty fantastic! But yes, electronic readers and the like are also destroying what we knew, and that can be hard to adapt to.
In college I worked at a movie theatre as a projectionist, and during that time I mourned the loss of film projectors as digital machines replaced them because #1 sweeping change of any kind tends to freak me the f**k out, and #2 because it was the end of a sexier era. Same goes for film photography, as a print producer in the mid aughts I watched sadly as that changeover happened too. Contact sheets gave way to hard drives, and with that we lost the sense of anticipation that used to be associated with creating an image. While digital can be slick, books and film of any kind are most definitely more relatable. You can touch them, feel them, experience their history as dog eared pages and dusty scratches, own them, shelve them, give them away...sexy!
Technological innovation is as undeniable as it is exponential though. The world we live in just changes
more and faster every day. I understand why it happens, but sometimes I want it all to s l o w d o w n or go in e-s-r-e-v-e-r...I guess I could move to Portland, but I don't really miss ice cube trays that much.
There are good steps forward too though, like vaccines. So while I allow myself to miss the book stores and post offices, I try to keep in mind that innovation also got rid of the the small pox - which was totally not sexy.
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