Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet 600
Hugh Pickens was one of several readers to let us know that, according to a NY Times story, the 89-year-old Ray Bradbury hates the Internet. But he loves libraries, and is helping raise $280,000 to keep libraries in Ventura County open. "Among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. ... 'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.' ... The Internet? Don't get him started. 'The Internet is a big distraction,' Mr. Bradbury barked... 'Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,' he said, voice rising. 'They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.'"
God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot to be said for libraries. The other day, my wife came home with a new library card. Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.
Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
It helps drive the economy forward. It helps people keep in touch. It allows people to access resources (such as Bradbury's works [raybradbury.ru]) they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
It's a shame how foolish and ignorant his remarks are.
Strange. (Score:1, Insightful)
It's strange for someone so vehemently against censorship to be against propagating information to ANY media.
"It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."
Sounds like hes boarding the firetruck as we speak.
And in other news, old man shouts at cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
Old Man Ray is also a flaming Republican. Sad to think of it since his work is so enjoyable but that's the long and the short of it. He went apeshit over Fahrenheit 9-11.
"No. 1, he didn't ask (permission), and, No. 2, he took it - period," Bradbury tells PEOPLE. "Even if he did ask, what he has done is a crime."
Speaking from his Los Angeles home Wednesday, the 83-year-old author says he never would have allowed Moore to use the name, "because it doesn't belong to him. It belongs to me. I have several new editions of the book coming out this summer. I have a new film version of Fahrenheit 451 with Mel Gibson starring, and it is going into production sometime in the next six months."
Bradbury says that Moore, 50, contacted him only last Saturday - months after the controversial movie started making headlines.
"He was embarrassed because he didn't want to call me," says Bradbury, adding that he felt Moore was "forced into" making the call and that the filmmaker hasn't offered to screen the film for him.
"He didn't want to face me," says Bradbury. "He is supposedly a big fan of mine and read my work years ago. Now suddenly he has to call someone he has been reading for most of his life and apologize for what he did."
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.
Re:Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's a shame how foolish and ignorant his remarks are."
On the other hand it's wonderful how wise and insightful his remarks are. Face it, the vast majority of time people spend on the internet is wasted in stupid, distracting ways. All that interaction and people in contact with one another? For what? Mostly so people can write abusive and idiotic things in forums? (Go ahead and include this one in there if you like).
Ray may be a bit over the top, but in an age where attention spans are roughly half that of a gnat he has a great point about simply wandering through stacks of real books that you pull of the shelf and leaf through. It's a different experience than Googling for something and is equally serendipitous. Not only that but books are way easier to read than a computer screen, and they're portable. Without batteries.
Bradbury is out of touch with reality (Score:3, Insightful)
The man is almost 90 years old, but he's younger than my grandmother who regularly uses email and praises it as a wonderful way of keeping in touch with her mobility-impaired friends. Age and stubbornness are not excuses for a man of his intelligence to hold such a myopic view of the world which HE HELPED CREATE. It makes me wonder if he has been to a library recently during business hours to see the throngs of people using the internet there to find jobs and better themselves.
Re:"In the air?" Come on! (Score:1, Insightful)
âoeItâ(TM)s distracting,â he continued. âoeItâ(TM)s meaningless; itâ(TM)s not real. Itâ(TM)s in the air somewhere.â
Many critics of digital media complain that the information is not tangible, like a book or a record is. That you can't hold it in your hands. But last time I checked, how a book physically felt in your hands wasn't important to enjoying and understanding a book. You read with your eyes, not with your fingers (braille notwithstanding).
So really Mr. Bradbury, what's your obsession with being able to hold things? Sounds more like materialism and hoarding instincts or misguided nostalgia than a genuine concern for the Internet.
I disagree with that. The tactile feeling I get from reading a paper book adds much to my enjoyment, at least for me. I've never tried a kindle, but I can't stand reading text from sites like project gutenberg.
I can read a real book for 10 hours. I can only stand about 20 minutes of text on a computer screen.
Re:And in other news, old man shouts at cloud (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And in other news, old man shouts at cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicans weren't so bad way back when they believed in small gov't and fiscal responsibility. Even if one believed that gov't had a role to play in society beyond simply maintaining the courts and providing for defense, one could still get along with, and even appreciate the perspective of, the old Republicans. A lot of old folk who call themselves Republicans may not be whatever the fuck today's Republicans are.
Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree; what an idiot. T
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet. Or, are you starting out with the Martian Chronicle instead?
If anything, given the level of thought that the man has historically produced, you might find it instructive to understand what his criticisms are. If anything, it would only serve to improve the internet.
Give him a Kindle! (Score:2, Insightful)
Give the man a Kindle preloaded with more books than his library. All that, in the palm of your hand.
Re:Why does he like libraries? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line.
????
All it takes is a single suitable PDF on some guys laptop plugged into his mother's cable modem to make that claim bogus.
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
The net just makes it cheaper and easier for ANYONE to publish.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Farenheit 451 required a visionary. But I think that Bradbury simply lost his vision. It's not about the books. It's about the minds BEHIND the books.
What to say about sites like fictionpress.net? What about webcomics with a deep story? What about Anime music videos?
The internet is a primordial soup for art and culture. It doesn't matter if it's in the air, or the tubes, or whatever. People communicate with the internet. If the internet is a waste of time, that's because WE have turned it into a waste of time (mostly because media cartels are enforcing so many copyright policies that the internet is being stripped away from creativity world wide).
Oh, and by the way... by the way... I wonder what Bradbury would think of his books being available on thepiratebay.
http://thepiratebay.org/search/ray+bradbury/0/99/0 [thepiratebay.org]
Not real anymore? Ray, I used to admire you, but you're losing touch with reality.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone so quick to dismiss the greatest communication tool man has yet devised as nothing but 'air' deserves harsh criticism, regardless of past accomplishments.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
That's rather the point of a library, is it not. The internet is not a library, because it does not have a librarian. The idea of a library is to have good material in it for a community to share in. The choices that the library makes are as much of a statement of humanity as anything else. When you use the internet, and filter noise yourself, you aren't getting the same level of service.
Re:Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The Gutenberg printing press and the Xerox machine makes changes easy.
OTOH, being able to instantaneously copy something to every outpost
of human existence (including a server that may be sitting on Mars)
makes it a lot harder to completely destroy something.
HELL, there's controversy over which version of Metropolis is the real one and that was a movie made 100 years ago.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a lot to be said for libraries. Bradbury may not like it, but these days one of the most vital things libraries do is provide free Internet access to the poor, as well as the elderly and disabled who may require the assistance of a librarian.
How real is the knowledge in your head? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is that in the air as well?
Ray Bradbury wrote some good books. One book in particular was truly great, providing a social commentary on the value of information and what it means to have open and free access. This makes him a man who was forward thinking for his time and perhaps means future societies will remember him.
Unfortunately, he's become a bit of a cranky old man. That's okay. I suppose he's earned the right to be one.
The value of his works shouldn't be diminished but certainly, time has passed him by.
Particularly ironic considering the events of the past week in Iran and the internet's enabling role in that continuing saga.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wanted to add that while the signal to noise ratio my be high, the signal is so incredibly strong that the noise is easy to filter out.
I could break down your arguments by saying things like, "Why rely solely on a book? If so inclined I could probably contact a few reputable PERL devs online and get real feedback and samples."
Books are great and have their place, but they pale very quickly when compared to the possibilities the internet offers.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention how sad it is for a science fiction writer to not understand the importance of the Internet
He didn't say it wasn't important. He said it sucked and he preferred libraries. For him, perhaps, the whole human face to face side of libraries, the visible comradery in a culture of learning and self improvement, outweighs the utility of search.
Re:Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
To make an obvious point: You can ban books, you can burn books, but try to remove a literary work from the Internet and see how far you get.
Do it surreptitiously so as to avoid the Streisand effect and you may actually succeed, depending on the specific literary work in question.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Insightful)
"Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it."
While some of that sentiment is expressed in hist post he has an overarching point: On the internet it's hard to get stuff done because you're just a mouseclick away from distractions (youtube, email, music, videogames, etc, etc)
When you go to a library there is much less potential for distraction and so you focus on what you originally intended to go there for.
While I agree the internet is just as wonderful if not more so, the technology hasn't totally caught up yet. I love google books, and being able to search books (something you'd never be able to do in a library of non digitized books). But the downside is endless distraction for those who lack self restraint.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly not an idiot. Out of his element, yes, but absolutely NOT an idiot. I'm almost two decades younger than Bradbury, but I can sympathize with him. The internet can confuse even the young bright boys - just start a discussion on internet security, and see how many really smart young people get lost real fast.
Books. I find myself reading more and more of my favorites on the LCD screen, but books have something that the computer will never have. Books are solid, and real - the pixels on my screen are fleeting. A solid book and a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter's night, listening to the storm blow outside......
Oh well, either you remember it and love it, or you don't.
But, don't call the old dude an idiot. Bradbury may not rank with Asimov and Clarke, but he a bright enough star in the SciFi and fantasy firmament. Never an idiot.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason for a book not found on the internet is people like Mr. Bradburry.
Why his book isn't on the net?
Because he didn't want it.
What can i say about this?
MEH. Your wish.
Eventually books will vanish, just like stone tablets did.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:2, Insightful)
So it's got a quickly-growing library in it, and then other stuff too (the other stuff just tends to get focused on more).
I would say the reason the other stuff gets focused on more is that there is more of it outright, if you could find any number of good websites that have factual checked data on whatever, there is at least 10 times that with incorrect data on the same subject. The problem happens is the majority is wrong, but is alot easier to find since it is the majority.
With the internet being mob filtered it almost always makes the info into what the mob wants to hear, or is what they are told they want to hear, regardless of the true facts.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:2, Insightful)
He actively stripped valuable content from the net.
How is that progressive?
Re:Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe?
The point of Fahrenheit 451, like the point of Brave New World before it, is that people choose an easy lie over complicated truth. They prefer their entertainment and their illusions.
When I look at the internet, I see a lot of illusions, but very little that approaches the factual power of a good book. And I am a content publisher who has made the choice to put future writings into books, because I see how the internet has been progressively turning into television since 1996.
I will still love those resources, including Slashdot, which are useful. But I'll pick a real encyclopedia over Wikipedia, ignore those forums and blogs, and pick up a quality textbook for factual information.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Just one example, there are many handbooks for the design, estimating, scheduling, and construction of buildings, roads and bridges that are not to be found on the internet. I have a shelf of those, and a good library will have them too. I have references for other fields for which internet resources are very scant except for popular general overview. Sure, CADD/CAE/CAM software can do some things, but not all. Most of man's knowledge is not on the internet, and it's tragic that young people think that because many popular things of the last ten years are there then most things are there.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:2, Insightful)
How sad it is that fans of science fiction, most of whom claim to be critical, forward thinkers can so quickly turn on one of their heroes. One or two quotes out of context measured against a life spent thinking about and imagining scientific possibilities. If someone you respect makes a statement you disagree with may I humbly submit that you think about that statement rather than seeking immediate gratification by posting a condemnation.
I enjoy the services and instantaneous delivery of the internet. When I look up from my keyboard I still see unhappy people, a daily grind, inequality, poverty and war. Science fiction is about dreams and possibilities, the internet is just the current iteration of communication tools, it will pass into obscurity like any other technology.
Odds are Bradbury's books will be remembered long after the internet has faded to obscurity.
have you read the martian chronicles? (Score:1, Insightful)
he grew up most of his life under the threat of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet. and it almost happened several times.
the whole book is about mankind gone mad, one obsessed with technology but with no wisdom about how it is to be used,
and a world in which nobody asks why we are doing what we are doing.
he is not against technology, he is against the misuse of technology. that is kind of the point of the whole book.
and as for the internet.... he kind of has a point. most of the 'development' is about 'doing it because we can', not 'why are we doing this at all'
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Two of the ideas behind Fahrenheit 451 is that books should be preserved, and one way to preserve them is in the minds of people (literally, word-for-word memorization). So, how is putting books on the Internet, where they can be copied virtually infinitely, a bad thing? And furthermore, putting a book on the Internet is like the ultimate preservation technique. Would that there had been some sort of Internet where books could be stored when the library of Alexandria burned!
F451 was misunderstood. I think Ray is more concerned with the balkanization of society where narrow-minded groups decide which book is valuable and which isn't. The Internet provides a perfect venue for t self-indulgent 'mind feedback'. A moon conspiracy enthusiast can spend all day on the web digging up research demonstrating the moon conspiracy, chatting only with other believers. A communist can carefully and efficiently filter the web to demonstrate that communism works. A library is too heavy, slow and solid for this to easily happen. Try to remove all books of a particular political flavor from a library, and you'll have to read nearly every book at multiple levels. Is "The Grapes of Wrath" pro socialist? Pro-communist? Is "Moby Dick" an environmentalist novel? Are modern biology or astronomy textbooks anti-Christian? You quickly run into the case where the whole library must be burned. The internet has enough noise that no one would notice 'the Firemen' pulling out content with depth beyond the shrill political zeitgeist. Right wingers can spend all day on foxnews.com, left wingers can happy choose from hundreds of news sources which feed them what they believe.
Ray has a point here. I've been working on a book which explains the problem with putting all our eggs in 'the Net' more clearly than I can explain here. Think of it this way, 30 years ago you could talk to your neighbor about what was on last night and chances are, you would've seen the same "All in the Family" or whatever. Now we have hundreds of channels on TV and on the internet, at least one 'channel' per individual. We can create our own reality and then find somewhere on the internet that will back it up. It is very fortunate that a library can't do that. Another thing a library can't do is make content disappear without anyone noticing.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Laugh if you want, but keeping digital data is hard. Really hard. Once you've printed a book on acid-free paper with good quality ink, you can pretty much assume it'll still be readable in a hundred years. The lifetime of most computer media is measured in years, not decades. And most printouts fade quickly, because they're done on laser paper, which doesn't last very long.
So I wouldn't accuse Mr. Bradbury of being senile just yet. I agree he's a curmudgeon, but we need curmudgeons to keep us honest.
OBTW... Get off my lawn!
Punk. :')
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is indeed a great gestational pool for new work. It's also a huge distraction, and a difficult place to concentrate. And once the new work is done, it's a dangerous place for it to live, both because it might be vandalized, and because the place where it is stored might go away. Sure, if everybody makes a copy it might work out, but people only copy what's popular and what's known. A system that depends on repeated copying over millennia to preserve a work for millennia is very vulnerable. Can you imagine getting something like the dead sea scrolls off of a two-thousand-year-old hard drive?
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would expect a science fiction writer to have a decent enough understanding that the information is the important thing, not the medium in which it is stored.
Nope... Not all SF writers write technical SF.
Books are heavy, clumsy things. They say the Library of Congress is about ten terabytes of information. That could be stored in a briefcase, instead of taking up over 500 miles of shelf space, in three separate buildings.
Great. If people like you ever have anything to say regarding the LoC, I'll turn up with 100TB of hard disk space and trade it for as many books and manuscripts as I can carry. Let's see. A Gutenberg Bible in reasonable condition. A rought draft of something called the Declaration of Independence. And some other nice stuff worth having. Of course, I will provide high quality scans of everything I take with me - because, according to you, the medium is irrelevant. :)
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree; what an idiot. There's more useful, educational information instantly available on the internet than any library in the world will ever hold. Just because he's too old and blind to find anything other than Yahoo games doesn't mean that the internet is distracting and meaningless
The library organizes information. It attempts to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. It is outward looking - not inward looking.
In following the threads here on the Thomas case -
some things become painfully obvious:
The geek doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
He doesn't understand evidence, the burden of proof.
He doesn't know how a jury is selected.
He doesn't understand the roles played by the plaintiff and defendant, the judge, the jury, the court of appeals.
It is easier for him to find refuge in talk of conspiracies, in talk of corruption.
The geek has access to infinite information - or at least thinks he does.
But mostly he listens to himself. He tunes out dissenting voices. He doesn't ask the right questions - and again and again he makes the same mistakes.
I'm sure Wikipedia alone has orders of magnitude more educational reading material than you could read going to the library three times a week for generations.
But why are you sure?
The geek likes big numbers. The geek trusts big numbers. The number of apps in his distro's repository. The number of pages in his Wiki....
The Veldt (Score:3, Insightful)
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet.
Bradbury also wrote The Veldt. The first significant story about the hazards of deep immersion in interactive entertainment: particularly for children.
Writers of Bradbury's generation have some very interesting and perceptive things to say about "cocooning -" social isolation and a pathologically extended adolescence reinforced by the new technologies of instant communication.
Re:Is there ONLY one thing to be said about books? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are some important tradeoffs between paper and digital media. I'm assuming we're talking about original works here and that e.g. transcribing a newpaper article doesn't count.
* Books aren't just rugged, they're also non-ephemeral in a way that web sites aren't. Much of the efficiency of the internet comes from cheap communication with centralized storage. But this means that whoever controls the storage has the power to change history. You can't change a million books in people's houses but old web pages can be lost or altered much more easily. When I go through my old del.icio.us bookmarks I often find 404s, which never happens on my bookshelf.
* The time and money needed for paper publishing creates an incentive for basic quality control. There are precious few copy-editors working on the net. Spelling, grammar, and basic comprehensibility all suffer as a result.
* Many popular formats on the internet (such as blogs) are inherently chronological. The focus is always on the latest information, and there's little incentive to improve or correct old content. Longer content is released a chapter (or section!) at a time. This is most visible (although less important) in webcomics, where the early art and storytelling can be orders of magnitude worse than the latest material.
* Books have total control over layout and formatting. Web content, which has to be viewed on everything from PCs to cell phones, doesn't. Formats such as PDF are much clumsier to use than HTML. Read Edward Tufte to find out why this is important.
* There is very little long-format content on the internet. A page or two of text is considered "long" for most purposes (in the context of Slashdot, how long is this comment? how long would it be on a printed page?). Several pages is huge, and a couple dozen pages is gargantuan. Meanwhile, even small books for children and short works of nonfiction are usually at least a couple hundred pages long. Short content is convenient (and thus popular), but there are ideas and levels of detail you simply can't reach in a few pages.
There are some exceptions to all of this, but the general trends still drive the way we communicate. And in general, books are longer, more expensive, better edited, and more thought out in advance, while web content is shorter, faster, cheaper, more accessible, more diverse, and lower quality. The net's advantages work better in shorter formats -- it's telling that the first (and most successful) things to be digitized were the letter/memo and the casual conversation, followed later by the want ad and article.
Will web content ever equal books? I don't know. Collections of related blog essays have been pulled from blogs, cleaned up, and published as books (Joel Spolsky's, for instance), which is a start. The Wiki might be a viable format, although I suspect open-content sites will never quite make it. Taking an idea from Fred Brooks, it may be that conceptual integrity is the most important factor in the quality of a written document, and it's hard to achieve that when you have a thousand editors. Good luck talking about it, though, since the net has a giant persecution complex vis-a-vis top-down control of publishing.
Here's an example of where I'm coming from: Recently I decided I don't know enough about biology. I took a class in high school when I was 15 and that's it (I'm 27 now). So I bought what appears to be the standard intro level college textbook (Campbell and Reece [amazon.com]) and was blown away. Despite being full of detail, the explanations are clear, and nearly every page has one or more full-color pictures or diagrams. There are many asides that link the topics to everyday life. Each subsection has about as much content as an average blog post. The book is 1,400 pages long. It cost $140 and I consider it worth every penny.
There is nothing like this on the internet. But
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Knock it off.
It's like winning the lottery to make a living as a novelist, let alone to become an artistic success. Like being musician, everybody loves what you do, but no one really wants to pay for it unless they're really a fan. I saw Douglas Adams speak at a bookstore, and one of his complaints/jokes was it's great how much everyone loved Hitchhiker's... if only they would have BOUGHT a copy. He said most of his sales seemed to come from libraries trying to replace the copy stolen from the library... It's a nice little joke, but the truth behind it is that even wildly popular writers sometime get really, really depressing checks. They're paid in fans, but not in money. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are big exceptions that prove that it is possible to strike it rich with the pen, but in addition to the amount of work it takes to write and publish a novel it's a lot like striking oil.
Read the biography of Phillip K. Dick. He had trouble getting checks for money he was owed. Bradbury has maintained his ability to pay his overdue library fines because he's assertive and sticks up for his rights. If he didn't, he'd have to buy canned dog food with his social security check and pray not to get sick. Not everything in life is like T.V., my friend, free to view but paid for by ads. That model does not work for everything. At some point, a writer has to be paid. Ultimately, they are paid by you.
And Ray's right about the internet. Stuff disappears off the internet all the time, waybackmachine not withstanding. Computers are better than any other technology at losing and erasing data.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the thing is, the internet is censorable from a central location. (Well, several central locations, actually, but the point stands.)
Remember what W. Smith's job was in 1984? Now it's not necessarily. The information can be altered in situ without anyone having any awareness of it. Web pages are a re-writable medium, so you can't tell what's been censored, and what's just been updated. The fact that it isn't the same today as yesterday doesn't prove anything. And the wayback machine is no protection. They'll remove things on request.
That's a part of the message that *I* took away from Fahrenheit 451.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Open wikipedia in a tabbed browser. Go to a topic you're moderately interested in. Open every hyperlink you think you might like in a new tab. After about an hour, count up the tabs you have. If they're fewer than 10, something's very wrong with your sense of curiosity.
Make a list of the topics, then go to the library and lookup appropriate physical books that describe the same subjects. See how much you can learn by reading those while allotting yourself only the same amount of time you give yourself to read wikipedia. Compare how much you learn.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know our civilization's ability to produce personal computers isn't going to vanish. At least a book is good for three centuries on proper paper, is our ability to produce hard drives so robust?
I'll echo this sentiment w/ a reference to A Canticle for Leibowitz [wikipedia.org], by Walter Miller Jr., as well as noting that although I have documents stored on 720k, three and a half inch floppies within arm's reach, I've got no similarly handy way way to retrieve those docs.
Obviously the fact that they're orphaned on a media for which I have no required hardware is my own fault, but it does serve as an example to illustrate the temporal nature of contemporary storage. I have a hardcover book from the 1920's in great shape, very readable and physically robust; yet even a printout of my fourth year honours thesis (one of the docs stored on the aforementioned disks) would be in rough shape by now had I printed it using the 9-pin dot matrix printer I had 20 years ago.
I can guarantee that there will be *no* post-apocalyptic need for anything I cranked out in 1989. But I take Miller's central question to heart - how to preserve man's scientific knowledge so that we're not doomed to rediscover electricity (or whatever) again and again? Forever is a long, long time.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
F451 was misunderstood. I think Ray is more concerned with the balkanization of society where narrow-minded groups decide which book is valuable and which isn't.
No, it's pretty clear it's about removing books altogether.
Wall screens replace books, people pick their political candidates on their looks. There's really not a hint allusion of balkanization in the book at all.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Libraries were never about pretense of the Librarian or even
of the local community. They were about having a large
collection of published works when acquiring suck works was a
highly expensive prospect.
Whining about the web or the internet is much like whining about
TV. It's very popular among the pretensious but all it really
demonstrates is that the whiners never really bothered.
Modern technology makes searching and filtering rediculously easy.
Beyond access to more information than you would have the money
to acquire on your own, that's all that a library provides.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd be wrong then. Epson's pigment based inks are archival grade, are projected not to fade for over 100 years; I have a $99 printer that uses them (never mind it's $160 for new ink).
Speaking as a film and digital photographer, with a sometimes-career in digitizing archival and library special collections, I do love Epson's archival inks. However your operative word there is "projected". We know for a fact that traditional paper and ink lasts over 500 years when cared for. In the next 500 years do you even think we'll be using ink or paper or optical discs for our day to day lives? But those books will still be there. Two-thousand years of human history will still be there, unless we choose to destroy them.
Basically these media companies (meaning the manufacturers of injkets, and optical discs) are selling us inexpensive product with the assumption that we will be dead or apathetic by the time our 4,000 pet and baby photos have disintegrated. In my lines of work, I have to switch modes between the client that wants to pay reasonably for a nice portrait on the wall for maybe 15 years plus 50 in the attic, and the institution that exists to keep a piece of history for the next 300 years until the building falls down. They're not the same. Do you really think your great-great grandchildren want to see your lolcat material? Maybe in fifty years everything will be equal in quality and price, but it's 2009 and we're not there yet.
On topic: The library information Ray Bradbury is extolling will still exist long after "Today's Internet" is an archaic memory. Though, I'm sure the Pokemon wiki pages will still be completely up to date. So there's that at least. ;)
yes, but (Score:3, Insightful)
There is much to be said for your way of reading, just as there's much to Mr. Bradbury's. There's also room for people whom do both, and I prefer a world where such variety runs rampant.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I had bought the hard copy of the newspaper, I would at least have proof that there was in fact an earlier version of the story, but relying on the net is foolish.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:God Bless Him (Score:1, Insightful)
Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.
While this is sort of true, it tends to be a bit of an over-simplification. If you have ever tried to get some real knowledge from the net, it is often not available. If you don't mind spending $200 at Amazon, you might be able to get what your after, or perhaps a similar amount for some scientific papers. (Sure, they may be someones thesis docs, but they end up in some archive, and it takes cold cash to free them ... )