reading

I had a little “ah-ha” moment while reading Roger Magoulas’s “Ebooks and the threat from ‘internal constituencies’”. He writes that “[t]he audio book market may provide guidance as an alternate media channel that complementarily coexists with print books.” In this whole semester, I’ve never once thought about audio books, I guess because I never listen to them or purchase them. There was one time that I did borrow one from the library. (I “read” To Kill a Mockingbird by audio book.) I found this “easier” way of reading to be much more difficult than just reading the book itself.

Barron's "From Pencils to Pixels" is a really interesting article. Obviously, the importance of computers and their impact on society should not be understated. However, I also think that their importance should not be overstated. His article does a good job at highlighting the benefits that computers have brought with them, and at shedding light on the areas in which computers have hurt society.

Dennis Barron writes that “while writing cannot replace many speech functions, it allows us to communicate in ways that speech does not. Writing lacks such tonal cues of the human voice as pitch and stress, not to mention the physical cues that accompany face to face communication, but it also permits new ways of bridging time and space.” This quote (as everything seems to these days) reminds me of my Literary Theory class in which we have discussed the difference between text in speech, because many of us (even literature majors) often elevate speech above text.

The debate between Johns and Eisenstein left me wanting, to be honest. It was interesting--they had some fascinating ideas and it is obvious their opinions of each other's work (and perhaps each other).

At the beginning of Chapter 14, Thompson makes an interesting statement, one which has been rumored for years (at least since I've been in college) and one which has often been attempted within various classes. The "bookless campus." It's an interesting idea, one which goes hand in hand with the quiet revolution Thompson mentions in Chapter 15.