From The Archive: Turn Your Computer Off, Now

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Turn Your Computer Off, Now - 09/08/05

Here's an excellent, thoughtful article in the Grauniad, by Marina Warner about why books are better than computers. It is something that should be so obvious as to not really need mentioning.

I know I - for example, spend far too much time reading stuff, most trivial stuff like blogs - the overwhelming majority of which - if not all - are like this one- a complete waste of time for both their writers and their readers.

Perhaps - it increasingly seems to me - the book is the pinnacle, at least as far as fiction is concerned.

More and more I seem films as a very poor substitute indeed for books. There is nothing so depressing - as in the recent War of the Worlds - as hearing of yet another film adaptation of a favourite , or even just well-regarded, book.

I have given up on the TV adaptations of 'great' books too. They miss so much out of what makes a great book a great book.

The irony of reading this article on the web, on a computer is - of course - not lost on me. I used to like - still prefer - the physical fact of a newspaper. Not the tabloid comics, of course, but a real newspaper.

However, there is - these days - just so much wasted paper in them. So much lifestyle junk, so many Polly Fillers and incestuous media-land gossip, trivia and oneup(wo)manship. It seems the larger, the more supplements, a newspaper gets the less there is in it I want to read. Simple economics has necessitated my move from print media to reading newspapers and magazines (where possible) on the web.

But why do I need all this information I so assiduously gather? Am I like one of those big-gobbed whales that hoover up the plankton as they unconsciously swim through it?