Technology "Guilt"
As I was reading _Remediation_, I kept admiring the book layout. Wow! the footnotes are right here, in the margins! And they are at a decent size so I don't have to squint! Look at the references to other pages! And then I realized, duh, it's a hypertext in handy print form.
I have yet to master reading, not skimming, on my monitor. For the longest time the only explanation I could come up with why this is the case for me is that I strongly associate "serious" reading with books, and quickie reading, "fun" reading, with the computer. (Though I guess there may also be a frame rate issue, though a fast investigation of this indicated that this is more the case with TV than with computer monitors.) I like to highlight and make notes in text, take the book outside or with me in a long car trip...and of course I could do all that with a laptop and Adobe Acrobat, but for whatever reason I just don't.
Meanwhile, I recently got a kick-ass digital camera. For years, while I enjoyed the convenience of digital photography, I still carried with me the notion that film was better, more authentic. My "serious" photographic endeavors had to be carried out with my SLR film camera, but I could have "fun" taking snapshots with a digital. Yet I STILL have rolls of undeveloped film, sitting near the front door. A day out at Prophetstown State Park taking pictures with my new camera and seeing the results right then and there - hey, that angle really was cool, while that layout didn't work so well - I finally came to the realization that digital photography was the way to go. Faster, immediate gratification - sorry, film. Reading this passage really crystallized this for me: "The process of digitizing the light that comes through the lens is no more or less artificial than the chemical process of traditional photography. It is a purely cultural decision to claim that darkening the color values of a digitized image by algorithm is an alteration of the truth of the image, whereas keeping an analog negative longer in the developing bath is not." (110) My "technology guilt", feeling bad for rejecting the previous generation of tools, was at last eased. I can let go of my attitude that film is more authentic... and I find myself wondering if I can at last train myself to concentrate and do more of my scholarly reading on my laptop.