I think it has occurred to most of us, though it probably made us all groan for one reason or another-- but one thing I do want to bring up are the obvious environmental implications of the mass-production of this technology.
Books are biodegradable. We cringe at the thought of our favorite book rotting slowly in the ground, but at least it can. The hard plastic of an e-reader should not be a deterrent just for nostalgic reasons, but also for the fact that we as a global society are in no place to waste as wildly and irresponsibly as we have in the past. We can no longer even pretend that we could have ever afforded to, much less continue to.
It seems like something that should go without saying, but here it is: we as a the nation of greed need to reflect upon whether we can continue to mass-produce plastic products that cause increasing strain on the world in which we live.
Already the Kindle has gone through three generations and I don't operate under the illusion that that number will stay small. Just look at the evolution and staggering figures of different cell phones, computers, portable music devices, ink cartidges, and game consoles we've gone through in the past fifty years. Before committing to a shift from paper publications to plastic ones, consider the consequences from all angles.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is a great point, but the argument on behalf of Earth relies on a distinctly *human* perspective, right? I mean, you are talking about "biodegradable" on a human scale—not on an 'Earth' scale. Kindles and the like *will* biodegrade; it's just that we probably won't be around to see what that geologic layer looks like...it won't be humans who decode that thin line of cell phones, plasma screens, laptops, and e-readers, broken down and compressed into a dull gray substratum.
ReplyDeleteThe question, it seems, is how can we determine a model for technological sustainability that reads across two discrete scales: for humans *and* for the Earth?