Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Craft (Page 14 of 18)

10 Productive Poetry Workshop Practices

PoetsImagine all these fellows in a poetry workshop? What drama would ensue?

One thing lacking in most writing workshops is a few minutes taken at the beginning to discuss workshop etiquette and basic expectations. A few months ago, I polled my fellow Sarah Lawrence MFA workshop compatriots, (Ann, Murph and Joann), and my cousin Gretchen, a writing teacher in Alaska, for their advice on writing workshopping. 

More recently, Jane Friedman posted an interesting piece on the four dangers of writing groups. And although we did not discuss bad craft habits gained from and critiquing ineptitude found in writing workshops, we did talk a lot about basic etiquette:

 

  1. Come prepared. Read everyone's poems beforehand.  It’s impolite and self-absorbed to coast through other people’s work.
  2. Be fully present. Speak up but share the floor. There’s an art to knowing how often to participate. Practice it. Take a few deep breaths before each workshop. You're not only learning the art of writing, you're learning the art of conversation.
  3. Joann said to listen bravely to suggestions without interrupting to defend your choices. Come to the table with a thick skin or at least some skin. Critiquing implies your poem is imperfect to begin with. Let it go. No suggestions are cut in stone.
  4. Don’t rewrite it! Be mindful of the project you are not doing. Be open to genres you don’t love, read or are unfamiliar with. Don’t insist the work conform to what you would like it to be. Murph put it well, “Try to discern what the writer is going for. Say what you think succeeds in the attempt. Then, if you see a specific approach or tactic that might help the writer achieve her goal, define it and suggest it as an additional approach to try.”
  5. All the same rules you learned in Kindergarten still apply. Be nice to others. Share. Take turns. Don’t have temper tantrums. Follow the group rules. Being a ground-breaking artist doesn’t mean you should attempt to be a rule-breaking participant in a writing workshop. Groups require cooperation. Solo work does not.
  6. Focus on the writing. Don't get derailed by the issues presented within the writing or personal issues outside of the writing. Respect everyone’s time and intention attending a writing group.
  7. Feel free to ask that specific issues or questions be addressed, anything you know for sure you need help with or feedback on.
  8. Spend time with architecture.  Murph suggested creating outlines or arcs that can help define what is fuzzy or where something is missing.
  9. Listen to yourself. Murph says don’t ask questions that are criticisms in disguise.
  10. Don’t get addicted to writing workshops.

 Ann sent along this Buzzfeed satire of Jane Austen receiving feedback in an MFA program.

  

What Poets Can Learn From Marketers & Their Attitudes About Empathy

EmpathyWe’ve been talking about how mindfulness and meditation affects the physical makeup of your brain’s gray matter and how ability to empathize is affected.

Poets may not consciously realize how empathy is working or not working when they write poems but even a decision to be emphatic or the ability to do it will affect the content and the tone of the poems you write and how you critique every other poem you encounter, the content of that poem and your attitude toward the poet who wrote it.

So at a foundational level, empathy will affect what you write and how you read because it fundamentally affects how you conceptualize the world.

From a brazenly marketability viewpoint, empathy is one of the big buzzwords these days. Similar to writing a poem, your ability to empathize affects the very foundation of any product you design. Without customer empathy, you can’t understand customer needs. Marketing guru Seth Godin defines what empathy is in this blog post:

Empathy doesn't involve feeling sorry for someone. It is our honest answer to the question, "why did they do what they did?"

The useful answer is rarely, "because they're stupid." Or even, "because they're evil." In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from.

Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

He also talks about flipping the rules here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/08/the-permanent-rules.html

In this PDF on Design Thinking:

Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process.  The Empathize mode is  the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge.  It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them….WHY empathize? As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of  a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.

Honestly, most of us have fallen somewhat short of empathy as critics. We’re too self-focused. But as a customer we usually get it immediately. We think, “You better understand me or I won’t buy your device, soap or service.”

But what about books and poems? Why is it taboo to have empathy for a customer as a reader? This is not to say you should write poems like a marketer would, although you’re free to try that. (Big secret: marketers have yet to understand how to do this themselves.) But it's the practice of human empathy that is the issue here.

Because marketers are under such pressure to sell, (and because they can be psychologically ruthless about it), marketers and product designers are usually ahead of the rest of us on understanding human experience. It behooves us all to listen to what they are saying. Don’t be that guy who misses the message for the messenger.

The PDF above also shows how workshopping is similar to product testing:

How to test: show don’t tell.  Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or your user within an experience.  And don’t explain everything (yet).  Let your tester interpret the prototype.  Watch how they  use (and misuse!) what you have given them, and how they handle and interact with it; then listen to what they say about it, and the questions they have.

I also follow Marketoonist. He has a good toon from 2013 on idea generation and submission issues for cartoonists. His commentary works as tips for writers as well: https://marketoonist.com/2013/01/brainstorming-ideas.html

  

Outside-the-box Learning Technologies for Poets

Poetry-technologyCD Classes

I've been purchasing some on-sale Great Courses classes on poets and writers.  We play them on the way to work in half-hour lectures. Monsieur Big Bang and I have take classes on the transcendentalist writers, Mark Twain,  and a good class on America’s best sellers.  The C.S. Lewis one we're on now is a bit too preachy and screechy in tone. I wouldn't recommend that one.  And warning: once this company gets your email, you'll have to ask them to refrain from sending you one every day. But it's all worth the price if you can get a deal on the mp3 downloads format which are the cheapest.

TED Talks

Did you know there are lots of poetry-related TED Talks?  In fact, there are many very valuable non-poetry-related TED talks, too. A friend of mine sent me these two talks this week, two that I think would be particularly useful for the often socially-inept poets at parties.

How to engage in better small talk:  This one surely applies to at least a quarter of the poets I have met in workshops and conferences. You know the ones! They ask you a list of variations on “Have you read this book?” This TED talk tells a humorous anecdote about that very question and why you need to move beyond it in social situations. 

How to magically connect with anyone is another good talk about basic human needs in communication (of which poetry is one).

Blog Learnin’

Poets hate to talk marketing sometimes but my day-job in marketing and web has led to many great resources for information on communication. You never know where you'll find food for thought.

Social Media Examiner and Marketoonist are very smart blogs for learning about the changing media landscape and the psychology of a consumer and human communication. They're also good to follow if you're ever in the position of marketing your own work. And no matter who your publisher is (or isn't), this applies to you!

Social Media Examiner, for one, might seem overwhelming at first. It helps to take it in baby steps, like one blog post a week or per month. I mean I do this for a living and it feels overwhelming!

But writers should understand the social behind the media. Learn basic concepts of communication and what people's need are. You don’t have to become an expert in every feature from every online media product. That would be a waste of time anyway; they come and go so often.

  

Ways of Writing

I0imageUser X designer Joel Marsh published a blog post about the differences between sketching ideas with pencil, using computer software, and working solely in your head. He says the worst way is working it all though in your head because you are very limited in memory and database retrieval.

There are some new theories for conceptualist poets to chew on: new ways of thinking about the free agency of “I” where the author says,

The same goes for all of us, almost all the time. We think we're smart; we're confident we won't be unconsciously swayed by the high list price of a house. We're wrong.”

  

Recipes for More Thinking in Writing

CriticalthinkingIt sounds obvious and I’m always saying this but, nevertheless, writing is thinking and we have, over the years, managed to separate the craft of writing, (the lightly intellectual tinkering with words), from the art of keeping our critical thinking skills refined.

I was reminded of this reading The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking by Richard Paul and Linda Elder who are from The Foundation for Critical Thinking. I received my copy of this booklet from the faculty admin trashcan at IAIA where it was addressed to a teacher long since gone.

Yes, sometimes my reading comes from trash cans.

The book covers elements of thought, levels of thought, intellectual traits and types of questions. It has a reasoning checklist, a template for analyzing your own logic and has a template for problem solving and assessing research.

Even if your poetry challenges some of the structures and assumptions of reasoning and logic, to write poems with no understanding of more sophisticated systems of thinking is to limit yourself, your poetry and your message. As they say, to break it well you gotta know how well it breaks.

But what interests me more, of course, is the narcissism of thinking you know it all already. In fact, that’s the big narcissistic mind-fuck of our modern age: we think we’re all pretty sharp scissors but such is part and parcel of our many self-delusions. Poets go even further with this affectation of their own brilliance. I’ve met quite a few who like to assume that because they write poems, they’re a type of instant intellectual.

Which is why my favorite part of the book deals with “Intellectual Standards and Traits” which, as the booklet says, form part of your inner voice. They break down Intellectual Standards into:

Clarity: Is the writer clear on the issue being addressed? Does the piece lack elaboration? Remember the goal of this kind of writing isn’t language theory, it’s strictly, (relatively), successful communication.

Accuracy: Does the writer speak in true statements? Their example is “Most dogs weigh more than 300 pounds.” Some facts are indisputably false. Which is not to say there aren’t good poems out there full of 300 pound dogs.

Precision: Does the piece provide detail and specificity or does it deal in vague generalities?

Relevance: How do the examples bear on the issue? Is the point irrelevant?

Depth: Is the piece dealing with the most significant factors? Their example is the superficial response of the Reagan administration to drugs with the “Just Say No” campaign which failed to deal with complexities of the issue.

Breadth:  Does the piece address other points of view?

Logic: Do the arguments follow each other logically?

Fairness:  Is the piece written in good faith? Are Facts distorted, biased, tainted by vested interests?  “We naturally think from our own perspective, from a point of view which tends to privilege our position.  Fairness implies treating all relevant viewpoints alike…[this is] especially important when the situation may call us to see things we don’t want to see, or to give something up that we want to hold onto.”

Then the book delves into the Intellectual Traits. These, I find, are what many poets, (most artists actually), are lacking in socially if not artistically:

Intellectual Humility (versus Intellectual Arrogance)
“A consciousness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively…recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. [This is] not spinelessness or submissiveness…[but a] lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations of one’s beliefs.”

Intellectual Courage (versus Intellectual Cowardice)
“Consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong, negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing…recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading …We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for nonconformity can be severe.”

[I’d like to add an addendum to my comments last week about Mark Twain. Sometimes the penalties of nonconformity can be ostracization from both sides of the issue, those whom you are defending and those whom you are fighting against!]

Intellectual Empathy (versus Intellectual Narrow-mindedness)
To imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them…to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. Correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand.”

Intellectual Automony (versus Intellectual Conformity)
“Rational control of one’s beliefs, values and inferences…one’s thought processes. Commitment to analyzing and evaluation beliefs on the basis of reason and evidence, to question when it is rational to question, to believe when it is rational to believe and to conform when it is rational to conform.”

Intellectual Integrity (versus Intellectual Hypocrisy)
“[To be] consistent…[to] hold one’s self to he same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one’s antagonists, to practice what one advocates for others, and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one’s own thought and action.”

[Were we ever rigorous thinkers, we Americans? If so, we’ve become fat and lazy thinkers, which brings me to…]

Intellectual Perseverance (versus Intellectual Laziness)
“In spite of difficulties, obstacles, frustrations…[and] the irrational opposition of others, to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight.”

Confidence in Reason (versus distrust in reason and evidence)
“…despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it.”

Fair-mindedness (versus Unfairness)
“Treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interest or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation.”

The booklet also elaborates on the problem of Egocentric Thinking: “Humans do not naturally consider the right and needs of others…[do] not naturally appreciate the point of view of others nor the limitations in our own point of view. We become explicitly aware…only if trained to do so.” Otherwise, we’re left with “our own egocentric assumptions, the egocentric way we use information…interpret data…the implications of our egocentric thought. We do not naturally recognize our self-service perspective…As humans we live with the unrealistic but confident sense that we have fundamentally figured out the way things actually are and that we have done this objectively. We naturally believe in our intuitive perceptions—however inaccurate.”

There’s also a list of self-centered psychological standards from wish fulfillment to group think to innate selfishness. These self-centered standards are kissing cousins to the list of mental biases and 30 Poems About Suffering.

There’s also a brief section on Sociocentric Thinking: “Most people do not understand the degree to which they have uncritically internalized the dominant prejudices of their society or culture. This phenomenon includes the “tendency to blindly conform to group restrictions, (many of which are arbitrary or coercive),” and the failure to “distinguish universal ethics from relativistic cultural requirements and taboos.” It also includes the “failure to realize that mass media in every culture shapes the news from the point of view of that culture.”

These are mental processes which, if ignored, will affect the types of poems you choose to write and read and the quality of every piece you write. You can be a technically savvy formalist or labratory-poet, but if your thinking is lazy, we all suffer for it.

  

You Are Biased (and more heavily than you know)

1276_colours_in_culture

For the last three years I have been doing the NaPoWriMo challenge. In this challenge, you write a poem a day for the full month of April. For the first year, I was all free form, meaning only that I was free to explore any form I wanted to experiment with. The second year I did a project called “30 Poems About Language” inspired by a modern poetry MOOC and the modernist and language poems I was reading in that online class.

This year, in response to readings I’ve been doing for my web content strategy and/ social media marketing job tasks and a pilot class on mindfulness I had attended at Central New Mexico Community College, I decided to do a set of cognitive bias poems called “30 Poems About Suffering.” I would pick a cognitive bias from the Wikipedia list and address that bias with mindfulness techniques (and also something from the news of the day to try to prove I wasn’t writing ahead). Incorporating the news turned out to be the hardest part. There were other technical challenges, one poem itself explaining why there are only 29 poems.

Turns out cognitive biases so crucial to understanding why we don’t agree with other writers (or humans) about politics, art and and day-to-day life. The site The Hipper Element posted a great video this week explaining the power of our mental biases:

“Watch a smart, adult man UNLEARN his intuition about how to ride a bike. Then RELEARN it. Then watch his 6-year-old son do it in a fraction of the time. This video is so relevant to UX [and political strategists and artists and writers], it’s hard to know where to start. As UX designers our job is to unlearn our own intuition, so we can design for people who think differently. But it takes a lot of effort, and it’s hard to undo.” Watch the video.

Here are my 2015 NaPoWriMo "30 Poems About Suffering:"

  1. The Confirmation Bias
  2. The False Consensus Bias
  3. The False Memory Effect
  4. The Curse of Knowledge and The Curse of Knowledge
  5. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
  6. The Next-in-Line Effect
  7. Functional Fixedness
  8. Illusory Superiority
  9. The Google Effect
  10. The Endowment Effect
  11. The Flaw Line
  12. Just-World Hypothesis
  13. Leveling and Sharpening Error
  14. Exaggerated Expectation
  15. Hot-Hand Fallacy
  16. Pareidolia
  17. Rhyme as Reason
  18. Hindsight Bias
  19. Barnum Effect
  20. The Bizarreness Effect & The Serial Position Effect
  21. Tip of the Tongue & Zeigarnik Effect
  22. The Empathy Gap
  23. The IKEA Effect
  24. Omission Bias & Post-Purchase Rationalization
  25. The Unit Bias
  26. Social Desirability Bias
  27. Reactance & Reactive Devaluation
  28. Irrational Escalation
  29. Bias Blind Spot

And yet there' smore information about biases! Culturally, we’re very biased about color.As a poet, this is good to know:

“This graph from Information is beautiful shows what color most commonly represents what emotion across cultures. Look at number 84: Wisdom. In Japanese and Hindu cultures wisdom is purple, while it is brown in Native American and blue in Eastern European. Or Love, which is Red in the Western world yet green in Hindu, yellow in Native American, and blue in African cultures.”

From the blog post on Pickcrew. Click on the color wheel at the top of this post to view the full spectrum of cultural biases on color.

  

If You’re Looking for Balance in Your Poems…

Compart…which I recognize not everybody is, it never hurts to understand the foundations of balance in other disciplines–whether you want to achieve it or wreck it!

When I was working as the Interim Faculty Admin at the Institute of American Indian Arts a few years ago, one of the instructors there was teaching from the book Composition in Art by Henry Rankin Poore. I was able to read a bit of it while I was there. The section on entrances and exits in pictures seemed particularly useful to a the composition of a poem as well:

“While mystery, subtlety and evasive charm all have their place in a work of art, they should not stand in the way of one necessary quality—immediate attraction. The picture should be like an open door to the view without anything blocking the threshold.”

“There must be one spot or area to which the other parts are subordinate and to which the eye is immediately attracted…[it] must be simple and uncluttered and have the essential ingredient of leading the eye on further into the picture. Any one element that stops the eye so powerfully that it simply cannot go on is destructive to the composition.”

“Getting out of the picture successfully is every bit as important as getting into it. This does not mean, however, backing out…The exit should be so carefully guarded that after the viewer’s eye has roamed about and seen everything, it comes upon the exit naturally. Providing two or more exits is a common error of bad composition.”

A little snack of food-thought.

  

Poetry as Usability

Useful

For work I’ve been reading both marketing and usability studies and essays on user interface design. A common idea across all of these areas is the trend toward creating more scannable content. This is primarily because users come to software and Internet pages to accomplish tasks, not to be entertained or enlightened.

Speed readers grab what they need and go! Designers use bolding and other tricks to help people scan a page. I see myself doing it when I come across a list of marketing tips. I scan for the main points and read further where I need to.

I can feel the knuckles crunching on the hands of writing academics, their blood pressure rising to a steam. Is quality reading losing the battle? Reading poetry takes attention. It’s the antithesis of scanning. It’s slow reading.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also listening to The History of the English Language podcast with Kevin Stroud.  In one episode he describes Old English Scops (or poets) who were once happily employed traveling to villages providing poem-casts of the latest news. Back then, poets were charged with keeping the news flowing in a time when nobody could read or write. Rhyming provided ways of understanding and memorizing that news. Truly, poets were the social media of their day. We’re fine with that right? Well then…check your self-serving diatribes about social media at the door.

Communication efficiency in the old days was good if it served poets. Is language efficiency bad now because poets are left out?  Culture changes and therefore communication changes.  Society is doing what it needs to do. This doesn’t mean that poetry should be eradiated from communication. It just means we won’t use it the way we previously did. Poems are not for distributing the news anymore. They’re for meditative moments, considered protests and language inquiry. Poems are not scannable; but wait, here comes the next experimental poem exploring scannability! Wait for it!

     

More Craft March: Intellectualizing and Performing

MindfulMindful Intellectualizing

I’m in a mindfulness program at CNM for faculty and staff. This week, we received a Harvard Business Journal article called Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain by Christina Congleton, Britta K. Holzel and Sara W. Lazar.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about how mindfulness can create changes in your brain in a very testable, physical way. This article goes further to make connections to how our brain behaves in states of  stress or mindfulness, what kids of thinking these states effect.

I feel this information has direct implications not only as to the type of poetry we choose to write but regarding why we write that way and how we conceptualize and intellectualize poetry. For instance, current arguments on form and conceptual poetries revolve around our sense of self, degrees of perception, complex thinking and the role of emotion and introspection. Turns out these ways of thinking are not only altered by mindfulness (homeostasis) and stress, but the brain is physically altered by continued experiences in these states. Specifically the hippocampus is one of the brain areas affected. Those living with chronic stress show smaller hippocampuses. This alters their sense of self, perception, body awareness, emotion regulation, and abilities regarding introspection and complex thinking. Mindfulness and stress affect another area of the brain, the ACC area, which involves decision making and resisting distractions.

Honestly, as an artist you can make any degree of homeostasis or stress work for you. That’s not the issue. What this does say, however, is that our intellectual differences in poetic identities and theory could be more physiological than truly intellectual.

It puts these endless arrangements in perspective if our predilections turn out to be physiological. It's possible we're not even starting on the same page, biologically speaking.

That Thing You Cannot Explain

Similar to last week's post on cognitive bias and persuasion, I've been finding a lot of good food for art-thought from articles on user experience and design. Joel Marsh is a self-described Experience Architect and his blog has some fascinating finds.  Here’s a quote he posted about art, science and “that thing you cannot explain”: http://thehipperelement.com/post/111467573348/art-is-made-to-disturb-science-reassures-there

ReadingPresentation

Mashable recently published a posted called "Why are poets' voices so insufferably annoying?", an essay on the annoyingly solemn voice poets use for public readings.

Without realizing it, I had been talking in "poet voice" — that affected, lofty, even robotic voice many poets use when reading their work out loud. It can range from slightly dramatic to insufferably performative. It's got so much forced inflection and unnecessary pausing that the musicality disappears into academic lilting. It's rampant in the poetry community, like a virus.

Some thought-leaders feel poets should affect this performative voice when we read in public.  However, most of the public feel we sounds affected and silly. This is a usability issue!

Similar pleas to end "poet's voice":

City Arts: Stop Using 'Poet Voice'

Huffington Post: Poet Voice and Flock Mentality: Why Poets Need to Think for Themselves

 

Crafty March: Persuasion, Cognitive Biases and Technology

UserdesignA Poem's User Experience

My day job is posting and editing web content so I'm always interested in user experience design and testing. I've read a few books on the topic, like Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen and Information Architecture by Morville & Rosenfeld. But to brush up for my new job I've been taking an online class on user testing and reading The Hipper Element's UX Crash Course in 31 days.

What is most fascinating to me is that user experience can be applied to anything, especially writing poems.

The Hipper Elements article #26 on persuasion is particularly interesting for those of us interested in how to speak with authority through a poem.

This list of cognitive biases is also something every poet should read. We all write with these biases and read with them.

Everything involves user experience…even a poem. Think about a poem’s user experience.

Thinking Back to the Book

For my job, I also read the latest edition (with illustration by Maria Kalman) of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I thought I had read it before but turns out I get this book confused with On Writing Well by William Zinsser which we read in college composition class.  Both of these are great book to re-read and yet Strunk and White's aim toward brevity leaves my Proustian sensibility feeling somewhat chilly. Absolute clarity is sometimes a route devoid of any atmosphere. Colloquialisms have power. And some superfluous words work to add emphasis and personality which a flat Stunk and White sentence lacks.

I took exception with the books distaste for the word offputting as in "That gesture is offputting. I am put off by it." I can visualize it. Personally is another emphatic word I would make an argument for, as in "Personally, I liked it." Yes, it's redundant but it lets the stress sit on the speaker when over-emphasizing the word I sounds silly.

In news related to words and the Internet, father of the Internet Vint Cerf says we may be entering a digital dark age. Read the full BBC News article.

Think about all your poems lost on floppy discs and you will understand his point. At some point in the future we will have devices that can't read our poems in outdated Microsoft Word files from 2007. Aren't you already annoyed by .docx files you can't open from your older computers?

While Cerf and others are working on very smart solutions to keep the world's content (including poetry) accessible, consider this when saving and publishing electronically.

On some level, I feel we might be over thinking a problem we created ourselves. After all, aren't books so far the most sturdy, eternal and accessible technology? Sure, they're burnable in libraries. But it would be pretty hard to destroy every copy of a popular book like the Bible or Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities which is still doing pretty good on the list of best-selling books

Books consume trees, but technology creates the physical trash of discarded plastic phones, computers and eReaders.

One drawback of the emerging technologies is their very asset: they continually improve. Our current content technologies are never static. Web browsers, software and hardware become outdated and unusable. eReaders will probably suffer the same fate. And the corporations pushing them are always itching to make prior evolutions archaic in order to force consumers to make a repurchase every few years.

Books, being pretty simple, seem to be immune from this dastardly cycle of expiration. It may get smelly, but I can still pick up a book from a hundred years ago and access its content.

 

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