When I was thirteen or so, my dad bought the family’s first microwave oven. The fight that ensued sent my sister and me into hiding. “I will not have That Thing in My Kitchen!” my mother squalled, over and over again, while Dad tried fruitlessly to reason with her.
“Well, I won’t use it!” she declared, as her last word.
“Fine,” my dad said, nonplussed. “I never intended to force you. The electric oven isn’t going anywhere.”
So he used it. And he found out (eventually; my dad can be kinda stubborn) that it’s great for some things—for others, not so much. The regular oven really is a better choice for roasting chicken. And much later still, my mom found out about reheating leftovers. By now she probably uses the thing more than he does.
The regular oven is still there, and still gets used. But if she’d succeeded in shutting down the conversation between her and my dad, she’d never have known that the microwave, in its own way, was useful too.
Last week, in the discussion section of my virtual-collections class, the print-book snobs started in. I’ll never read an ebook (or, as they put it, “a book online,” which begs an awful lot of questions). What happens when the power goes off? (You can’t read a book in the dark. PDAs and ebook gizmos are backlighted. Wanna ask that question again?) The print book has Stood the Test of Time. (The ebook hasn’t had a chance to. Come back in four hundred years and we’ll revisit that one. Oh, and while we’re at it, how many incunabula are extant now, compared with how many we think were printed? New perspective on the much-decried data death, I suspect.)
Oh, and all that “technology” stuff—it’s bogus, it ruins our lives, we hates it, we does. (So much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. But defining “technology” might do as a jumping-off point.)
And the final insult: Computers will never replace the print book. Oh, come on, people, who said they were trying to? (Other than print journos looking for a catchy headline and snake-oil salesmen trying for another sale.) Honestly, the level of hostility toward print imputed to me as an e-text enthusiast by this sentiment verges on the personally offensive. Really it does.
Print-versus-e-text, to me, is exactly analogous to oven-versus-microwave. Print and e-text each have strengths and (little though those who would put the print book on a pedestal like to admit it) weaknesses. It behooves us to think about these things, experiment with them, find a good mix. We can’t do that if we dogmatically assert that e-text is bad.
To my shame be it spoken, I completely lost my temper. Foom. Gone. Oh, I’ve done worse on CavLec, and I certainly didn’t make the parenthetical smart remarks above, but it definitely wasn’t pretty. I have not read and do not intend to read the responses to my broadside (except for the one from the professor, which rather unexpectedly backed me up); if nothing else, CavLec has taught me when I really, really need to drop an argument.
What made me pop my cork, as I hinted above, was that people were shutting down substantive discussion of the relative merits of print and electronic materials, just as my mom tried to shut my dad down about the microwave. I don’t mind discussing electronic-text drawbacks. I do so regularly, and I learn from people’s objections also. But I discuss with a view toward making e-texts better, not demonizing them, certainly not wiping them off the planet. I ask, “Would it be better if ebooks…” rather than declaring “Ebooks don’t do X, so ebooks are eternally useless” and turning up my nose.
Now, I have my own technological blind spots. You couldn’t pay me to carry a cell phone; I don’t believe anybody needs to get hold of me that badly, and I strongly dislike the attention division that Rheingold rhapsodizes in Smart Mobs (which I am reading for my intro course). I do hope, though, I’m never quite so closed to discussion as my mom faced with a microwave oven.
