A Horrible Carr Accident

I think this article raises some interesting points about the effect digital media has on the written word/the English language. I agree that the ease of altering text will have certain ramifications on society, though I doubt they will be as widespread as the author imagines.

Mainly, I have trouble imagining a world where all students use only digital textbooks. We are a world in transition, transitioning away from printed text and into digital text. However, it will take a while for that transformation to be complete and I think that remnants of printed text will still be around even when we solely rely on digital text. Not to be a nerd, but there's an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor explains why there is a giant library planet--because people miss the smell of books. They miss the touch and the feel of printed text. I think this is very accurate--there's something fundamentally different between reading a book and reading an e-book.

Call me a hopeful believer in our government but I think that as we transition into a digitized world, our laws will progress to prevent too much editing. I don't quite agree with the author thinking that local digital textbooks will be edited to fit in with local bias--or even if they will be, there's no reason towns couldn't edit an analog textbook as well.

Finally, I agree that there has to be a certain amount of closure when printing a book. This closure is lost when the work is done digitally, because editing is so easy to do. I don't see any way around this, though. I think it is a side effect of living in a digitized world. When it comes to poetry and fiction, small edits don't really matter--Walt Whitman edited his work multiple times as he released more and more editions. So long as there aren't insidious edits, I think a little tweaking is fine.

Basically, the author brings up interesting arguments but I think the problems he points out have existed ever since Gutenburg invented the printing press and ever since the Civil War when newspapers became extremely popular. We are a society addicted to information: the constant stream of it, the changing of it, and it doesn't matter in what form we receive it. The transition into digital text is not a problem itself, it is a human "problem."

And that's what I think about this article.