Oh my! You thought I was writing about a camping trip? Me too! We should hang out.
The thing is, I go camping to think. When I think I don’t necessarily think about camping. This trip I was thinking about dead tree books versus electronic media.
You know what this means? It means brace yourself because I’m about to go on a tangent.
Since I’m already going off the rails, within the tangent I’ll hit a sub- tangent! That’s combined primary and secondary tangentialism! (Which is totally a word because I said so.)
You’ve been warned…
I have a theory. E-books and dead tree books are subtly but deeply different. The words, of course are identical. The difference is in how your mind registers what it’s reading.
Many years ago I reluctantly purchased a Kindle. I was impressed and quickly embraced e-books. I wasn’t just saving money (which I did), I was reducing the annual tonnage of bric-a-brac cluttering my household. Every year our house accumulated dozens (perhaps hundreds) of books. It’s always been that way. I hate throwing them out (or selling them for a pittance) and everyone loves big stuffed bookshelves. But at some point it gets out of control. Stacks of books grow from pleasant libraries to warehouse type issues.
The arrival of e-book readers was timed just exactly with the complete and utter collapse of bookstores. It’s not merely a cause, bookstores had it coming! They became useless, got worse, devolved into insufferable, and now most of them are broke.
Book shopping used to be a magical moment. I miss them! I remember walking into into a store and looking at that vast library of knowledge and thinking “this is all for me!” The titles seemed endless and I’d happily peruse for hours. Every few weeks I’d pick one or two titles out of the immensity of options. Those shopping trips were like Christmas to me.
Alas bookstores should be places where introvert readers sell books to other introvert readers… ideally with a cat hanging around somewhere. They became soulless corporate shitholes. Bored, barely literate, temporary flunkies who hadn’t read a book since high school stocked shelves with whatever crap corporate HQ was trying to sledgehammer into the skulls of formerly inquisitive readers. Interested in a discussion of Adam Smith? Fuck you! You’re going to read Hunger Games! Read Hunger Games and really hankering for some 1950’s sci-fi? Fuck you! It’s time for Game of Thrones. You’re going to eat shit and like it! Bookstores became brokers of woke shit and half-literature. Walls of duplicate books about sparkly vampires and bland committee written non-fiction “instructionals”. Everything a mile wide and an inch deep. “Chicken Soup for those Desperately Needing Affirmation” shelved next to “Programming in C++ for the Idiot”. The periodicals declined and information drained out. “Motorcycle Chrome HD Aficionado Photo Magazine” replaced “Chilton’s Guide to Keeping Your Shitty Car Running”. I have a homestead and hissed in response to “Generic Gardening Magazine; sponsored by $50,ooo Kubota mini-tractors”. It’s one thing to grow a tomato, it’s another to use a machine with a six year payment plan to do it.
It was as if a door closed. I didn’t cause it, but I saw it happen.
Without bookstores and indeed lacking in good books, e-books (particularly of whatever old classic thing I haven’t yet read) became a practical refuge.
I don’t have regret but I notice a problem. I didn’t notice it with e-paper but I notice it with the Kindle app on an iPad. (I “wore out” an e-paper Kindle, and then I wore out a standard Kindle Fire, and now I read on a iPad.)
Warning: I’m about to digress within a digression! Yep, prepare as I grenade a reasonable thought process with practicality unrelated to books:
A note about the iPad (which I use as an e-reader). It’s particularly handy when camping/adventuring because I use the Avenza navigation app. To me, navigating with the iPad is superior to a phone not despite but because it’s mildly inconvenient. Avenza is damn good navigation software for certain purposes and I can display it on any number of gadgets. Most people use Avenza on their phone. I don’t.
Here’s why. Having a phone forever in your hand (or clipped to your vehicle’s dash or clamped on ATV handlebars) changes you! It changes your thinking. It changes how you interact with your environment. Spend too much time dicking around with your navigation display and you might as well be a drooling teenager swiping Tik-Tok feeds. You go outside to be fully immersed in the moment. You must turn the screen off and look at the real world. Ever present navigation displays create a dependency of mind. Stare at that screen enough and you’ll forget that the map is not the terrain. You’ll never learn to evaluate a situation and determine which direction to go based solely on what you have physically encountered. One cannot fully navigate reality when engulfed by watching a dot on a database.
Before you reject me as a ranting Curmudgeon, give it some thought. I said any person will miss something (a lot) if you let navigation software lead you around like a dog on a leash. It’s not the gadget it’s the lack of self-reliance.
A person who travels in a group and always lets “the leader” pick the trail is just as unaware as the dipshit with his nose glued to a phone. It’s easy to tromp down the trail behind someone else and lack the slightest fucking idea where you really are. Slavishly follow anything, electronic or not, and you’re just sheep following a shepherd. That goes for an electronic gadget, a paid wilderness guide, or a hiking companion. If you’re not paying attention you’re not really present.
So, my phone (which could run Avenza) goes off and gets stuffed in the bottom of my pack. My SpotX is often off, but usually clipped to me. It has navigation abilities but they’re primitive. It’s pretty much for emergencies only. The larger clunkier iPad, with it’s large screen and superior map view must be fished out of the pack for consultation when necessary but not every step of the way.
In practice that means I navigate on common sense and dead reckoning 99% of the time. I occasionally check Avenza when I get to a “fork in the road” or want to plan the next few hour’s travel. I’ll fish it out, check it, decide my next move, and then turn the thing off and cram it back amid water bottles and spare socks.
Also, I do not allow cell service on my iPad. Avenza can use the iPad’s GPS to locate itself pretty much anywhere on earth but I have to load Avenza maps for the appropriate area before I leave civilization.
This is good! You should always check some sort of map before you go wandering about. Grabbing a handy Avenza file in advance enforces good thinking.
This isn’t a hard challenge and you don’t have to be a dick about it. I’ve often been near the edge of a map and so decided to download the adjacent map while chowing down on a burger at some random bar. All I need is Wi-Fi, not the Library of Congress. By the way, because I don’t have a data plan, I cannot check the weather on the iPad while I’m at camp. Which is OK with me.
What I’m saying is that it’s better to move through nature thinking about what you’re seeing. Following a blinking dot on some remote database is handy but it’ll erode autonomy and common sense.
It doesn’t mean my opinion is popular, most folks follow that dot like a cat with a laser pointer. Having an unpopular opinion doesn’t make it wrong.
Wow! That just came out. It was a rant that wouldn’t stay untyped.
Back to the matter of electronic displays versus “dead tree” books, I believe our brains have been “trained” by various displays. Yes, yours too. Whatever part of your brain “activates” with a screen is subtly different than whatever activates with a plain old “dead tree” book.
We all use screens (whether it’s a phone, tablet, or laptop), often for hours a day. Every screen is always displaying ephemeral crap. I theorize the brain learns that stuff in front of it on a screen is “fleeting” and therefore of lesser importance. Maybe the screen is a spreadsheet at work, maybe it’s some dickhead on social media, maybe it’s the weather report, maybe it’s some airhead spewing “news” about whatever we’re ordered to believe today. The ultimate similarity of all those things is that the stuff you’re seeing will be gone (usually forever!) in hours or even minutes.
I don’t know how it works for folks young enough that they never read “dead tree” books. I shudder to think about the mind of folks that simply don’t read at all. But I’m old enough to associate a bound stack of printed sheets of paper with something that persists and therefore matters on a much longer time scale.
On campouts, I’ve been experimenting with reading dead tree books versus e-books. In my next post I’ll list a half dozen books I’ve read and whether I’ve quantified the dead-tree / e-book divide.