I think the human body will get stranger as coming generations evolve lightning quick thumbs to operate the hand held gadgetry they already seem to find it impossible to live without. Also with ever improving visual media (video then DVD then Blu-Ray etc) future humans may well develop the pin-sharp eyes of an eagle!
I am a voracious reader but have never looked into this Kindle type stuff. I'm not particularly comfortable with technology that forces us to speed up with everything and rush through life to stave off boredom. They're starting to stock the store shelves with Christmas items and it's only September! on Boxing Day the Easter eggs will start appearing! What's the matter with us? Slow down for God's sake!! I do welcome the convenience of modern technology, but some kids today seem to have the attention span of a Guppy, have an inability to be patient and are far too easily "bored". I never learned how to get bored, seriously (until I got to grips with instruction manuals of any type: the one thing guaranteed to glaze me over into a trance - must admit the idiot-proof plug & play attitude of modern manufacturers is a Godsend!). I've sat in waiting rooms (too many times to reflect upon due to family illnesses and hospital emergencies over the past several years) and I've taken great delight in the lost art of daydreaming. It's called having an imagination; I sit back and draw cartoons or write story chapters in my mind as time floats on by: I'm always mildly shocked at the thought that everyone can't do this.
Also I still love the look and feel of a solid, well-bound, real life book - in the same way that some people prefer tangible DVDs or CDs/records rather than this sort of semi-invisible, nebulous download/streaming stuff which many of us just don't grasp. To be honest, to the exasperation of many, I can even see the merits of videotape at times - at least with tape you can physically SEE how much tape is left, observe whether it's re-wound etc, manually record over or after it (but not for much longer as VCRs die out). I can't do this with a disc where all the encoded info is, at a glance, invisible. We know acetate film and magnetic tape eventually deteriorate: has digitised media been around long enough yet to know just how long a shelf life it's ultimately got?
Remember when we were told that these new "compact discs" were crystal-sharp and physically indestructible and would make vinyl records redundant? Paper books have survived for centuries which is good enough for me. Escalators are great but there's still room for ordinary wooden staircases in the world. I suppose I'm just a lazy old Luddite, really.
I was talked into abandoning my CDs (a shelf space issue) in order to embrace "the cloud" (?) and get iTunes on this iPod thing my son got me. But when my computer crashed and the hard drive was lost, my son was only able to bring back what he'd last saved for me on an external hard drive. Since he'd done that, though, I'd significantly updated my iPod with lots of new music from CDs I'd then got rid of. If I try to synchronise my iPod with my computer now, it will be wiped and replaced with the limited behind the times version stored on the hard drive. It means I can never update my iPod with new music, so the Eight Days A Week soundtrack, for example, is annoyingly absent from my listen-on-the-go device. I did have the good sense to hang onto all of my Beatles/solo CDs (and the vinyl before that) but lots of stuff by other artists I got rid of to make room.
The irony is that my son, who talked me into this, is now collecting vinyl??!!??!!??
