Andy
: ?Christine Rosen is one of our most important social critics, a keen observer of technology and culture. I urge you to read every word she writes, especially this essay. I could hardly decide which section to excerpt, but this observation on Amazon's Kindle (which I am warily eyeing, and may well purchase when it comes out in version 2.0) is typically incisive. I often find myself several degrees more optimistic than Rosen about our technological follies, but her critiques are worth pondering.?When you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a posture of consumption. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has admitted, the Kindle “isn’t a device, it’s a service.”
In this sense it is a metaphor for the experience of reading in the twenty-first century. Like so many things we idolize today, it is extraordinarily convenient, technologically sophisticated, consumption-oriented, sterile, and distracting. The Kindle also encourages a kind of utopianism about instant gratification, and a confusion of needs and wants. Do we really need Dickens on demand? Part of the gratification for first readers of Dickens was rooted in the very anticipation they felt waiting for the next installment of his serialized novels—as illustrated by the story of Americans lining up at the docks in New York to learn the fate of Little Nell. The wait served a purpose: in the interval between finishing one installment and getting the next, readers had time to think about the characters and ponder their motives and actions. They had time to connect to the story.