READING THROUGH YOUR EARS

Came across this unusual site during my usual stint on the net , while trying to catch up with new things. It's a website which provides the audible versions of various articles picked up from magazines, newpapers, novels and what not , beautifully categorised into various genres and presented in the downloadable formats.And its banner goes as follows :

Listening saves. Money.
For just a handful of change a day, Audible can help
you stop reading and start learning.

My goodness !! Just read that again, I mean what has come of this age, we now even get advertisements about such hairbrained schemes and services which can help us stop reading !! Has technology overwhelmed us so much that even before one would have thought about using it to help people start reading , we are designing ever new ways not even to preclude but to completely go against such good uses. If that wasn't much, the audible version of the site promotions has a sweet and charming female android voice requesting its visitors to stay tuned for the next of their series which is - "Learn to Stop Breathing!!".

The shift of print media on the net was the first blow to those who believed in book learning and considered that there's nothing better than holding what you are reading in your own hands . The idea though untenable was to signify the positive effects of direct proximity to the matter being read in hand, plausibly making it more easier to understand and conjoin the two ends i.e. the reader and the content in an uncanny manner.

And even before most of us would have come to this realize the loss of renouncing the task of direct physical reading , came the second blow in the form of this site , which forgoes even the task of reading and makes it more than comfortable for anyone to just sit around or continue whatever they prefer more than reading and hear the whole novel, the whole magazine or the whole newspaper as a background incantation. But where are we actually being led by all this : Children will as with any other cause be affected in a bigger sense, they will give up more tiring and relatively painful task of reading with a book in hand, more casual readers will find an easy way out to increase their book counts without actually having understood what the hell was the book about, and the number of avid bookworms will start plunging in a straight line graph.

I am not trying to criticize the way ppl have started using technology to generate easy revenues, its good in fact and I would have done the same , rather am wary about the growing propensity of ours to see a digital solution to all of our problems. We have reached a stage of human development where technology potentially seems to have answers to all our problems, but what we yet need to learn is how to distinguish between problems which can with precise assurance be solved using available technologies. And obvisouly not all of them can be..

Not an epoch,we just need to wait in time for that day to fall when the conversations will include statements of the form : 'Hey have you heard the second part in the series of H2G2'

so long !...