what is a book?

Just what constitutes a book these days. I have shelves full of paper bound with glue and thread, covered in ink... I know those are books. Some of you read on Kindles of Ipads. Are those books? Cheryl and I listen to "books" on disk as we commute back and forth to Santa Barbara from Buellton along the Gaviota Coast. Are those books?

We've read or listened to some wonderful books recently and I've found myself wanting to blog about a few or at least mention them in my blogs but wasn't sure how. Should I say, "we're reading The Things They Carried" or do I say that "we're listening to...?" Frankly, something inside me is a little embarrassed to say that we're listening to whatever book as if that is cheating somehow. And in some ways it must be a different experience. The reader does impose himself or herself into the text and does interpret it with their inflections and tone of voice and somehow that does remove part of the experience we get when reading a bound document, providing the voice, the inflections, in our minds. Clearly it is not as different an experience as watching a movie made from a book, but it is still different in some way.

How significant is that difference? Is that audio book, whether on disk or MP3 or whatever, still a book or is it a different medium altogether? And how about an i-book? What do we lose when we don't hold the paper and flip the pages? What do you think?

Wii Wii

We have a saying in our house regarding boy's bathrooms - "boys are happy if they hit something." In large degree that is true for men as well, just check out any gas station's men's room and you'll see what I mean.

It took a Japanese company to look at the technology of the Wii and those facts... and come up with a game...



unbelievable

Shift Happens

A friend sent me this link....

it is long but raises some interesting questions.

glumbert.com - Shift Happens

no to feeds

Sometimes I'm a luddite... I find myself rejecting some technological changes just in principle. Feeds are one that I'm still rejecting. Why? I like the surprise of finding something I wasn't expecting to find. I like not having to read everything that is out there (even from people who's blogs I want to read). I like the possibility of going to a blog and finding nothing new or a whole bunch of new posts. It feels relational when I choose to go to someone's blog to read what they have to say.

On a related note, there is a wonderful film available called The Devil's Playground which is a documentary about the Amish rite of passage called Rumspringa. In the film there is one Amish man who is interviewed regarding their relationship to technology and he said that they are not against technology for technology's sake. They are against the impact that it has on relationships with one another or with the world around them. Zipping by in a car stops the individual from being in relationship to the landscape. Sitting around a television stops the family from interacting.

So... I'm resisting feeds.