tiredI'll start with the clinical: according to the dictionary (and Wikipedia), poverty is "the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions." So if you don't have as much as everyone around you, you're poor.
I'll move on to the personal. Poverty is the state of waking up freezing in the middle of the night because it's a waste of money to run the heat when everyone is sleeping anyway, and you need that money to buy lunch meat from the "eat it tomorrow or it will kill you" clearance bin. Poverty is the state of making that lunch meat last a week and a half, even after the edges have started turning green. Poverty is sending your little sisters to beg staples off the people in the crap-ass apartments surrounding yours, because everyone is poor, and everyone is hungry, and cute little girls stand a better chance of success than anybody else. That's poverty.
The U.S. Census Bureau said that 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009. According to the report they released this past Tuesday, the national poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010...and we still don't know what 2011 is going to look like.
This is the "official" poverty level, by the way; there are a lot of sociologists who think that the actual poverty level is much higher, since we calculate using a "socially acceptable miniumum standard of living" that was last updated in 1955. To quote Wikipedia again: "The current poverty line only takes goods into account that were common more than 50 years ago, updating their cost using the Consumer Price Index. Mollie Orshansky, who devised the original goods basket and methodology to measure poverty, used by the U.S. government, in 1963-65, updated the goods basket in 2000, finding that the actual poverty threshold, i.e. the point where a person is excluded from the nation's prevailing consumption patterns, is at roughly 170% of the official poverty threshold."
Things that did not exist in 1955: home computers. The internet. Ebook readers.
It is sometimes difficult for me to truly articulate my reaction to people saying that print is dead. I don't want to be labeled a luddite, or anti-ebook; I love my computer, I love my smartphone, and I love the fact that I have the internet in my pocket. The existence of ebooks means that people who can't store physical books can have more to read. It means that hard-to-find and out of print material is becoming accessible again. I means that people who have arthritis, or weak wrists, or other physical disabilities that make reading physical books difficult, can read again, without worrying about physical pain. I love that ebooks exist.
This doesn't change the part where, every time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to "Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier," what I hear, however unintentionally, is "Poor people don't deserve to read."
I don't think this is malicious, and I don't think it's something we're doing on purpose. I just think it's difficult for us, on this side of the digital divide, to remember that there are people standing on the other side of what can seem like an impassable gorge, wondering if they're going to be left behind. Right now, more than 20% of Americans do not have access to the internet. In case that seems like a low number, consider this: That's one person in five. One person in five doesn't have access to the internet. Of those who do have access, many have it via shared computers, or via public places like libraries, which allow public use of their machines. Not all of these people are living below the poverty line; some have voluntarily simplified their lives, and don't see the need to add internet into the mix. But those people are not likely to be the majority.
Now. How many of these people do you think have access to an ebook reader?
I grew up so far below the poverty line that you couldn't see it from my window, no matter how clear the day was. My bedroom was an ocean of books. Almost all of them were acquired second-hand, through used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and library booksales, which I viewed as being just this side of Heaven itself. There are still used book dealers in the Bay Area who remember me patiently paying off a tattered paperback a nickel at a time, because that was what I could afford. If books had required having access to a piece of technology—even a "cheap" piece of technology—I would never have been able to get them. That up-front cost would have put them out of my reach forever.
Some people have proposed a free reader program aimed at low-income families, to try to get the technology out there. Unfortunately, this doesn't account for the secondary costs. Can you guarantee reliable internet? Can you find a way to let people afford what will always be, essentially, brand new books, rather that second- or even third-hand books, reduced in price after being worn to the point of nearly falling apart? And can you find a way to completely destroy—I mean, destroy—the resale market for those devices?
Do I sound pessimistic? That's because I am. When I was a kid with nothing, any nice thing I had the audacity to have would be quickly stolen, either by people just as poor as I was, or by richer kids who wanted me to know that I wasn't allowed to put on airs like that. If my books had been virtual, then those people would have been stealing my entire world. They would have been stealing my exit. And I don't think I would have survived.
We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a "have" from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the "have nots" also exist, and that we need to take care of them, even if it means we can't force our technological advancement as fast as we might want to. I need to take care of them, because I was a little girl who only grew up to be me through the narrowest of circumstances...and most of those circumstances were words on paper.
Libraries are losing funding by the day. Schools are having their budgets slashed. Poor kids are getting poorer, and if we don't make those books available to them now, they won't know to want them tomorrow.
We cannot forget the digital divide. And we can't—we just can't—be so excited over something new and shiny that we walk away and knowingly leave people on the other side.
We can't.
October 25 2011, 14:06:45 UTC 5 years ago
Ho yes, I've migrated through various format changes (decks of cards, 9 track tape, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, 3.5" floppies...) :) Key word though is "migrated." I still have files from back then because when a new format rolls around I copy what I had from old to new. I still have files from when I began dinking with computers in the late 70s as a wee lad. My point was more that there are ways to make backups that are essentially immune to tampering.
Yes, I'm aware of the Amazon Kindle-editing issue, but that's one company and one device -- and a heap of bad publicity. I'll just say that if the government got to the stage where they went to the actual effort of deploying software that somehow edited every single format out there for specific books, we would be in a massive lot of hurt as a country and civilization more than those book would protect us from! That would no longer be the world as we know it and book censorship would be the least of our worries. However, I think the probability of that all-format book censorship happening is so remote, and the remedies simple enough (once we see such a catastrophe begin, people can print or transcribe those books to paper, clay tablets, encoded body tattoos, memorize them, whatever), and the realistic benefits of ebooks so much more apparent, that I'm not worried about it. So yes, I agree, I don't want anyone editing my books without permission; but I think the chances of every copy getting edited in a conspiracy are near zero, and if it was a secret government censorship thing, we'd have a whole lot more to worry about than the books.
As for asteroids, secrecy, and panic, yes, and I'm not sure that wasn't the right call. The disruption, deaths, and destruction (physical and economic) could be huge from a needless panic (i.e., asteroid safely whizzes by but people killed each other trying to escape highway parking lots/etc.) Not to mention, if it's a dinosaur-killer sized rock, with years of crop-killing impact, it won't much matter if you were in an urban high-rise or isolated farm, things are going to totally suck if you happen to survive. I think the only time it would be better for society as a whole to announce an impending asteroid impact was if you were absolutely certain it was going to hit, and that the impact would be worse than the damage caused by the massive panic. (Let's say you had a month's notice that it would hit in the Atlantic and cause a massive tsunami; then it would be better to start an orderly evacuation of the east coast. But if you didn't have time for that, or lacked certainty where it would it, or especially _if_ it would hit, then the certainty of the damage from panic probably outweighs, from a mathematical probability "expectation" standpoint, the damage from the strike. The math is simple, actually. You multiply the probability of the event by the cost of the event; estimate for each and compare.) But then I've always said if there was a civilization-ending disaster coming, I'd prefer to be obliterated painlessly as casualty #1 at ground zero. :)
October 25 2011, 21:13:43 UTC 5 years ago
Even I have to admit there's logic to that statement that can't be argued around. James Burke's Connections series covered that in its first episode.
I do know this though: Before I ever buy one of those reader devices I will go through every bit of the "fine print" to make sure that it doesn't come with a "right to edit" clause.
"However, I think the probability of that all-format book censorship happening is so remote, and the remedies simple enough (once we see such a catastrophe begin,..."
That's a problem--since when do we ever see a catastrophe coming? We don't, otherwise it would simply be a big problem.
As for book censorship, you may be looking at the problem from the wrong angle. I've fussed and fumed for years that our Govt. has deliberately done everything in its power to dumb America down since the 60's. Why bother to censor books when all you have to do is make it "unfashionable" to be well read?
You have no idea how many times I've told parents that books make good b-day and holiday presents for kids only to have the parents themselves frown and dismiss the idea.
:(
February 24 2013, 18:54:55 UTC 4 years ago
February 24 2013, 20:39:20 UTC 4 years ago
First reading becomes unfashionable and then easy or free access to books becomes almost impossible when real printed-on-paper books become unavailable thanks to digital readers becoming popular and now the attack on public libraries has well and truly begun.
All I can say after reading that man's article is that, back when I was a child, I'd have read very few books if my parents had had to buy each and every one of them! (Many little kid's books go for $20 each in hardback! Paperbacks for teens and adults are nearly $8-12 each these days.) Thank Heaven for the library and the used paperback store. I often read tattered paperbacks with loose pages simply so that I could buy more of them. (You could find the tattered ones for 5 to 25 cents back then.) I used rubber bands to hold them together when I stored them.
Here in the US, very few stores actually sell books anymore. Groceries may carry magazines or a few paperbacks or get the occasional bin of cheap books in stock but that's about it.
Independent booksellers are as rare as rhino horn and just as much in danger of becoming extinct. The big bookstore chains are in danger of going out of business these days or they are becoming little more than stores that sell toys, novelties, and computer software nor are they easy to find thanks to the chains spacing them out 50-100+ miles apart these days.
Like I said before, you don't have to pass hard laws to force the general public into dumbing down and becoming easier to handle.
All you have to do is encourage them to be lazy. Make getting an education harder to do by making learning to read harder to do as well as UNFASHIONABLE and the people will do the job for you.
These days our politicians have decided--against all advice from teachers--to mandate the teaching of reading in kindergarten. Most American children of kindergarten age haven't yet reached the age of "reading readiness" and many of them still have limited vocabularies so it's a largely wasted effort trying to begin teaching them to read at this age.
Most children will come away from this with a distaste for reading rather than any early knowledge or skill in reading.
Thanks for the link--I think I'll write a journal entry on it. People need to see it.
:(
February 24 2013, 21:11:39 UTC 4 years ago
You're welcome.
February 25 2013, 10:00:20 UTC 4 years ago
One unintended effect is already beginning to bite them where it hurts.
Since the 80's when they first began to let school lockers and other personal gear be searched at school and began drug testing the kids, we've seen a couple generations grow up over here which are suspicious and totally untrustful of our government or any figure of authority. These young people keep their mouths SHUT around anyone who isn't "one of them" and you will never ever catch one of them venturing forth with an unasked for opinion.
I think we will see a lot of these political dinosaurs driven out of office as the last of the WW2 generation finally becomes too old and ill to make it to the voting booths.
:|