Quote:
Originally Posted by radleyp
Jobs is no idiot. What he is saying (and illustrating via his product line) is that the visual and the aural (regularly transmitted by computer) are trumping (or already have trumped) old-fashioned reading. Reading, in his view I think, is an old technology. I hope he's wrong, but don't be too sure. In this country especially there are surveys allegedly showing that the present generation reads much less and I think that if you did a large survey of readers (especially books) today, you would find a much higher percentage of readers among those over 35 than under. The thought depresses me, but facts are facts.
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Aural media require too much concentration in order to digest a 'story'. But it allows the user to believe that the story can be 'heard' while attempting other complex tasks such as driving - very bad thing! With reading, one *knows* one can't do other complex tasks at the same time. And I know I can read a book faster than someone can 'read' it to me.
As for visual... Yeah, right. Don't make me laugh. To get the richness of detail and the depth provided in a novel, I'd be looking at 6, 8, maybe even 12 hours of uninterrupted video??? Who's going to shell out the money to create the sets, the props, the background details... and then there's the pay for all those actors! Sure, one can do that, but for every single novel?!!? And who's going to want to dedicate terabytes of memory storage to hold all those expensive videos??? What do we have, about 10,000 movies? As opposed to almost 100,000 novels! I've got nearly 200 DVDs in my collection of favorites, but I've got nearly 20,000 novels! And I've been going through and buying or scanning all those into my computer to save/free-up shelf space.
The real problem with reading is that we've been training our children and ourselves to go for the quick-fix entertainment instead of the depth of novels. But we could fix that by putting more emphasis on reading for fun instead of playing football and video games.
Derek