Guy’s article caught my attention because he revealed the rather depressing news that eBooks outsold their physical predecessors on Amazon over the Christmas Consumer Festival. His argument though is nothing particularly new, the idea that our society and culture are underpinned by various needs and the material way in which these needs are satisfied which is in turn threatened by the ever expanding reach of technology is fairly familiar to anyone who has been following the debate. That does not mean the idea is less valid nor is the question of who benefits from the new technology unrelated.
I looked at a Kindle recently and after a few minutes with it I could easily imagine the marketing potential. It looks a bit like a book, it feels a bit like a book and it has words in it like a book. You can carry it with you like a book and it works in standalone mode quite well for a few weeks until the tiny power consumption overwhelms the inbuild battery. So far it’s just like a book, except it needs charging every now and then, but the real marketing power lies in the fact that a kindle like device means you can read or view a variety of things on the same device. So instead of having to lug fifty books around with you on your holidays, if that’s what you do, you can simply load them into your kindle and provided you have a source of power handy your reading pleasure is assured.
But a part of me feels like this is a con job. I struggle to read enough now and having another device will not actually give me more time to read. Convenience in having a small library neatly tucked into a book like object might be a good thing but it isn’t convenience that prevents me from reading, it is time and sometimes motivation. My reservation about the eBook phenomenon is that is a solution to a problem we don’t have. Carrying a bunch of books around isn’t really the issue unless you are a student perhaps, what is an issue for books and reading is that people are so busy consuming other physical things or absorbing neatly packaged media that reading books is becoming a chore.
The marketing solution is simply to package the reading experience into a something new that can be sold to consumers as a benefit. The essence of the this technology is that a. it is convenient and b. it is something we don’t have but need. I disagree with both. It is not convenient for me to have yet another gadget that I must come to terms with so I can then do my reading. I refuse to have to learn that a book needs to plugged in every now and then or connected to the internet to get is material or any of the other idiosyncrasies that go with a new bit of technology. And I refuse to learn those things not because I am some rebellious hippy but because in learning those things Amazon can make money from its investment in technology.
I think we need to be very clear about this. The eBook has arrived now because the business model that has driven the computer age is rapidly running out of options. Making a buck out of the computer business is getting harder, consumer fatigue has set in, the market is saturated with workstations, laptops or netbooks and the technology has become so ridiculously cheap that growth is looking decidedly limited. Yet the financial investment in the technology and needs of capitalism to sustain ongoing growth mean that something must be produced that will maintain consumer demand. Since the computer age has already liberated many bits of writing already, the eBook is a logical extension.
What is clear is that this technology is being sold as a benefit to consumers but in reality it is a benefit to the producers of the technology and those that have financial investments in the technology business. And like all con jobs it carries with it hidden costs that are ignored in the glossy sales pitch. The eWaste problem, the consumption of limited resources, the assault on the writing process that has grounded book publishing for hundreds of years and the questionable rationale that the internet is somehow beyond the reach of controlling interests. All of these issues are non-existent in the glossy sales pitch, its all about the convenience of buying online everything you can imagine.
But if what we can imagine is driven in part by what we are exposed to in our daily lives, what we see or hear or read, then the eBook disease becomes another form of thought control in much the same way as TV functions. Books as standalone things that take people out of the world at large will become things that put people back into the larger world. I will be spared the serendipitous experience of sharing a read experience with people I meet because my read experience will simply become just another pattern of consumption online.
However I think Guy’s essay on the potential impact of technology on our society misses the point. It isn’t the technology that threatens our culture and our society, it is the capitalist imperative to commodify every part of our lives that poses a greater threat. The eBook disease is simply a logical extension of combining capital and marketing with applied science without imposing social limits on the growth of money. Wringing one’s hands over the death of books without recognising that it is a consequence of our ongoing acceptance of money as the determining force in our lives simply allows the debate to miss the point. We are not harnessing technology to do what we really need it to do, that is, to produced a more sustainable and socially agreeable place because we have allowed technology and money to determine our cultural and social agenda.
What can we do? Well I’m not buying a Kindle anytime soon despite the tsunami of publicity that is swamping me. I don’t need one.
The internet is sundering the social connections we need.
