Ebooks May Herald A New Advance For Humanity

Written by Irving Pirela Thursday, 21 July 2011 07:51

About five hundred years before eBooks made their entry onto the human stage Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Reading and writing skills were opened up for everyone, not only the privileged few. This dramatic discovery had huge implications for science and technology but the quality of human behavior does not seem to have advanced to the same extent. Terrorism, child abuse, slavery and animal torture survive still. There is room for improvement.

About five hundred years before eBooks made their entry onto the human stage Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Reading and writing skills were opened up for everyone, not only the privileged few. This dramatic discovery had huge implications for science and technology but the quality of human behavior does not seem to have advanced to the same extent. Terrorism, child abuse, slavery and animal torture survive still. There is room for improvement.

Reading and writing are, in the first place, technological skills. Although spiritual and emotional matters may be recorded and debated in writing and reading, the factual realities of practical things are more easily handled though literacy skills. For example, a scientific formulation that is expressed and explained in words can easily be understood and extrapolated when new problems and needs emerge. However, a moral dilemma such as suicide bombing might defy any logical analysis.

It is not an accident that computers are operated through languages and that 'computer literacy' is required to work with them. Information technology has emerged as a science, regarded by some as the preserve of scientists and mathematicians. However, reflection on the significance of social networking and eBooks suggest otherwise.

Unfortunately the tools that are the distillations of many brilliant minds may far exceed the intellectual capacity of those who operate them. Terrorists and thugs can easily get access to weapons of mass destruction and idiots or clever hackers who are moral pygmies can push themselves in behind a keyboard.

If popular culture is an indication of the collective intellectual power of the world there would seem to be room for improvement. Films that would not test the intellectual capacity of birds are made and screened in full public view, and apparently accepted without a squirm by many reviewers some of whom award them stars.

This sort of instinctual behavior might never be erased from the human psyche. However, the thought behind e-books was that the collective, intellectual behavior of human beings might be moved up the evolutionary scale several notches by the application of technology, to feed back into literacy what literacy has given to technology.

The aptly named Project Gutenberg began in 1971 with the idea that the literature of the world would be made available online to everyone easily and cheaply. Since then the eBooks industry has expanded exponentially. Many online sites sell and legally resell digital products at affordable prices. The ease with which a diversity of texts can now be accessed seems to set the stage for a new surge in literacy and its attendant benefits for humanity.