My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.
It is not the digitization that worries me at all--after all, without the binary digits, this blogging itself won't be possible!
It is Bradbury's bottom-line in the shockingly accurate prediction of how anti-intellectual we will become, surrounded by television screens and disconnected from society ..... that is worrisome. Every time a huge gazillion inch high definition television set is purchased, it further pushes us into a hedonistic life. A hedonistic life where nothing else matters.
Now, in an existential framework within which I mostly approach life, well, I am absolutely ok with whatever people want to make of their lives--I suppose my worry stems from the high probability that the hedonism is not a result of informed decision-making. And it is not based on being well-informed because, hey, that HD TV means no reading or thinking. After all, as Bradbury notes in Fahrenheit 451, thinking makes people depressed :)
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