And this time ~1600 years ago

'The reason I want to conquer the civilized world and bring them back to the stone age is that nobody there reads cave carvings anymore, and dances around the fire.' said Attila the Hun. 'When I conquer barbarian tribes, people cannot get enough carvings in the caves we keep them in. They demand to be transfered to new caves so they can get access to new carvings. But the so called "enlightened" Europeans are just happy to stay in the same cave, and instead demand these things called "books". The saddest part is that these Europeans have no appreciation whatsoever for the beautiful carvings in the upscale caves that we specifically made for them. They also cannot hunt, and don't know how to dance around the fire properly. Our civilization is heading for extinction, unless the current trends are reverted!'

Yes, No, Maybe

Who but a crazy person would contradict Doris Lessing? Not me! I'm only 7/8 nuts.

Now, I can't speak to the rest of the world, or even what goes on down the street, but much my public scholastic life in suburban Toronto, from Grade One when the school library was first made available to me, right through the end of High School (and including Jr. High), libraries were busy places, but not for reading, research, or the signing out of books. Rather they were places to hang, dude, when the cafeteria wasn't available. A lot of *shushing!* happened between grades 7 and 12. I and some of my friends were the weirdos, of course, pouring through encyclopaedia and dictionaries, and borrowing books by the barrowful. That reeeally wasn't the norm, however. As to Ms. Lessing's dire observations, she's probably right. I suppose a trend could be established beginning with, oh, the advent of Radio, through TeeVee, video game parlours and pre-net gaming consoles, all of which diverted attention away from the printed word. Funny enough my own observations of the present *are* a little contradictory: I see kids reading a lot. Time on the computer has largely supplanted those other distractions (except for gaming consoles), but even with the fetid jungles of Facebook and Chat clients keeping kids dumb, they are at least reading *something*, just not literature or poetry. Another technology will emerge, the tides will turn, the bell curve of literacy will be a little further compressed, and the next generation of leaders will have yet tinier vocabularies and attention spans. Let's just hope that they're a peaceable, inclusive folk. I'll check in again in a generation.

True... indeed.

Sure... It's like calling 0800-KNOWLEDGE bearing in mind you can gather any wisdom true a phone... Internet is THE tool for comunication, it have the potential to become the omnipresent library of the world, but that's a utopia that would need such a infrastructure as huge as, perhaps bigger, than Internet ITSELF. You need somewhere to collect knowledge... you need a BOOK, a reference, may it be a PDF, may it be a online exhibition... It need a start.

People nowadays plainly "walk" thru the internet like it's buying groceries... They get mail, they download a pack of s***, they blog-blog-blog, and put up they weekend photos... in the end of the day they think "Oof... been in a tech world is so hard... I'm no advanced being, hail me..."

How many of us use it for something USEFUL? It's so minimal it even hurts.

Knowledge is being overstuffed in labs to create new generations of products everyday, meanwhile you don't know how to cook an egg, you can't fix a pipe, you don't know how the more basics things that surround you work, geesh...

Ok, go on, download the latest HD background, superb. ... Can you paint a frame? DO YOU STILL KNOW HOW TO HANDWRITE? God, kill me! I'm sick.