Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html
STATEMENT:
Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.
Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.
For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.
Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.
In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.
In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.
Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.
It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many, if not all of you, regard yourselves).
So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.
If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.
And yes, there will be a test. |
Huh?
There's one thing that probably slips your oh-so-acculturated mind:
we read.
Exactly that,
we read. Just because we use an e-reader (and no, Kindle isn't the only option) it doesn't make it any different from reading on
paper.
Just to let you know, my e-reader does contain Proust's works, the Old Testament, Sophocles, Socrates, George Eliot, Dante Alighieri, Shakespear, Tolstoy and many many others. And, lo and behold, most of us have
already read in full those classics that you mention. And I can repeat by heart many great latin and italian classics.
And do you know why? Because we value the
text more than the
medium.
What is a book, is it the paper it is written on it or is it the text that the author wrote?
Just ask yourself that.
Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity it's true, and I can tell you one thing: paper does not increase your brain capacity, it merely develope your index finger, and contributes to the death of trees.
Your brain increases only if you use it. And I must say, today I have seen one who doesn't use it.