(no subject)

[meorae]

I remember editing a friend's short story in seventh grade. We were supposed to write descriptive stories about the present and then modify them so they were about the future. She originally wrote hers about going to a bookstore and then changed it by imagining what bookstores would be like in the future. In the story, books were mainly read electronically, and if I remember correctly, were forbidden to be read in paper form, which made normal books rare. At the time, I owned my laptop and was getting sucked into the world of fanfiction and the internet. However, the majority of my free time I still spent reading books, the paper kind, so I didn't really get the story. To me, it was an interesting take on the future, but then I promptly forgot about it and picked up whichever book I was reading at the time.

But coming across two links recently got me thinking about the story and the present. This week, an article was published in Scientific American about the ability to record everything of your daily life in a personal digital archive. The article discusses the work of a Microsoft researcher, Gordon Bell, who has switched from paper to electronic data in his life and created his own personal digital archive. The archive includes every website he visits, every email he sends or receives, every phone conversation he has and pictures of everywhere he goes taken by a really interesting camera that snaps pictures whenever the light level changes or a new person comes within view. The article predicts that it isn't long before digital archives are common. I'm wary of the idea mainly because of privacy issues, which the article does cover, but it got me thinking.

More and more of our lives are becoming electronic, as shown by the millions of new features cell phones and iPods have, the popularity of so many online things like youtube, and the fact that many of my teachers have blogs/websites, rely on email to send announcements or receive homework, and use youtube videos (although not now that it's been banned...) or Google videos to supplement their lectures, which compared to last year is a huge change. The Economist writes this week of electronic money and how cell phones in Japan and other countries are used as debit cards, storing and transferring money. For the past however many years, there have been reports on how online news services are taking away the audience of traditional news services. Everyone knows about myspace, youtube and wikipedia, plus Second Life is showing up all over the place in the news, and in many places, so is fanfiction. It isn't too much of a leap for everyone to have a personal digital archive or for paper things to become rare. There will probably always be an audience for paper things and I don't believe our society would ever decline far enough to ban paper books, but right now really is an electronic age.

And then today, I came across this site, which allows you to subscribe and have four pages of whichever book you want emailed to you either three, five, or seven days a week. It mostly has classics and older works because of copyright, but I've subscribed because I don't read books anymore and many of the books on dailylit are books I've been meaning to read, but never have. Although I'm not reading fanfiction anymore, I haven't been able to get back into reading books that aren't for school; I've only been reading short articles, essays, blog posts and wikipedia entries. I have tried ebooks in the past because it seemed that they would be a compromise between fanfiction and real books in that they would be real books on my computer, but I have never gotten far with them. Dailylit seems like it will work better for me, though, because it's a short email every day rather than a huge pdf file or whatever that I would have to find every time I want to continue reading it. But it's interesting that all of four years ago, I had trouble imagining an electronic future and went everywhere with a book, while today, I'm signing up to get pieces of a book emailed to me each day.

Comments

[arsinyk.livejournal.com]

I like that site. I don't know how much I'll actually find it helpful, but it's a cool concept.