Erin's blog

There was a time when items were cherished until they grew mould. When cavemen had a perfectly good pair of wolf hide slippers, and killed more game, they didn’t say, ‘hey I should have a brown pair too’. When I used to visit my grandmother, she still used the scratched dinner setting that she was given at her wedding. Once, naive Erin asked her why she didn’t get a new one, and I can’t remember what she said because I was four but I imagine it to be some witty form of, ‘what’s wrong with this one?’. Yet now, we have this culture of replacing things that work perfectly well.

Literature has evolved a great deal in the last two decades. In the 1990s if you wanted a book, you would go to Dymocks and buy it in paper back. Today, you can download, buy, borrow or even stream it online. Adrian’s unlecture touched on this on Tuesday. The form of the book does not aid it’s story, article or information. The same text appears on the screen, as is in the physical book. The novelty is gone, but what can you use novelty for anyway?

The point however, that so much is changing in the form of what we are reading, therefore our reading habits will have no where to go but up. We will mould to our new experiences and adapt, as we have done with so many other things. It makes sense that what we get out of reading, will also alter, aided by hypertext, word of the hour.

The modification of our lifestyle is accelerating drastically, times they are a changing, and short of moving to Katmandu, there’s nothing you can do about it.