Being an 50's-ish fogey, I still enjoy reading words on a printed page with a sensual delight inspired by its texture in the hand vs. pixels whose electrons dance and shimmer on a monitor. So, too, does Carolyn Moynihan:
Reading real books -- especially for mere pleasure or cultural enrichment -- becomes a luxury when practically everything I need to know can be found at speed, and often conveniently pre-digested, along the highways and byways of the internet. For writers, the net is a tremendous boon. Essential background information, new data, half forgotten quotes, the opinions of major figures in the commentariat can all be accessed with a few clicks of the mouse. And there is always so much more; each hyperlink represents another lode of information waiting to be mined, and it can be hard to call a halt. Add to that the reading and sending of email, the scanning of news feeds and blogs, the odd foray into YouTube and (something I have dodged so far) greeting friends on Facebook or other social networking sites -- and the time scheduled for a couple of chapters of Solzhenitsyn (or Stephen King, if you prefer) is gone, devoured by the Shelob sitting at the heart of the Worldwide Web.
Does it matter? After all, reading is reading and knowledge is knowledge whether it comes on paper between two covers or on a computer screen -- isn’t it?
Read more of
The Web vs. the Book.
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