Digitize This

What’s with all the digitization?Everything from newspapers to slides in the slide library to magazines to museums collections are being digitized, and it’s pretty unsettling- specially for all of us old fogeys who love everything in print and on paper. We were talking with Kirk the other day and he definitely wishes that everything wasn’t going digital (because, as he puts it, “there’s nothing better than grabbing a cup of coffee and sitting down with the morning paper”), but he wasn’t sure if it was an age thing.So basically I started to think about it too, and I decided that I’m very picky with what I like digitized. What I mean is that I’m happy that some stuff is digitized and accessible on the internet-it’s really nice to have museum collections available online, for example- but the morning paper? I know, I know. It’s more accessible, it’s free, it wastes fewer trees and all that good stuff. But I can’t really help but agree with Kirk on the subject of newspapers.I really do like flipping through a newspaper. Maybe it’s because that’s what I did after school everyday (I needed to be at school by 7:25, and so I didn’t have time to do it in the morning). I very clearly remember sneaking into my grandmom’s room every afternoon while she was sleeping so that I could sit and flip through all the newspapers to see what was happening in the world. I also very clearly remember the sections that I would look at and what order I would look at them in (headlines, world news on page 4 and 5, the arts section and the sports section in that order). Somehow, clicking through all those sections on my screen just doesn’t feel the same as flipping through a newspaper, and it definitely doesn’t give me the same kind of satisfaction.Like I’ve said here before, if I end up becoming an art writer, I can’t say that I will end up being severely disappointed. But I do know that if I do write and get published, I would really like to see my work in print, and on paper, in front of me. Seeing my writing-the final published version of it- on a screen just wouldn’t work, and it just wouldn’t satisfy me at all. So if newspapers do become physically obsolete, I know I will most definitely become very disappointed.

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