The following excerpt is reblogged from irisblasi.
Then, reading along just now in Nicholas Carr’s fantastic The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, I came across yet another example of this kind of paranoia:
[J]ournalism will be the whole press—the whole human thought. Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other—sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book—the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper.
It was written by French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine.
In 1831.
Change is coming— that much is sure, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone to disagree with that. But I urge you not to forget: Books are resilient, and time of death has been called before.
What do you think? Is the book on its way out for real this time?
