Monday, June 18, 2012

When Form Trumps Function

By  - International Herald Tribune - Published: June 17, 2012



LONDON — A few weeks ago, some friends had a baby daughter and I sent her a set of beautifully bound literary classics that I have loved reading over the years. Excuse the soppiness, but I hoped she would enjoy them as much as I had. Even so, no sooner had I ordered them than I wondered if I had blundered.


Left - Jes Aznar for The New York Times
When it comes to traveling, an e-reader has many advantages over its tradition-bound competition, the book. It’s lighter, smaller and can hold hundreds of titles.



Joao Pina for The New York Times - A bookshop in the LX Factory complex in Lisbon; the aesthetic appeal of a finely made and printed book makes the form’s survival more likely.


Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times - The broad distribution of cellphones with built-in cameras has revolutionized how people take, store and distribute snapshots.

Guillaume Horcajuelo/European Pressphoto Agency - Higher-quality cameras, like the digital SLRs used by journalists, provide a degree of versatility, quality and control that can’t be achieved with a cellphone camera.


Will Frankie (that’s the baby) read books at all? I’m not suggesting that she won’t be interested in their contents, but that she may prefer to digest them in a different form. She will undoubtedly do most of her reading on the pixelated screens of digital devices, but will she also feel inclined to do so by looking at ink printed on paper in the old-fashioned way? Possibly not. Is her gift already obsolete, or might those books seem as enticing to her generation of readers as they do to mine?
The same question applies to dozens of other endangered objects that are familiar and, in some cases, much loved aspects of our daily lives. It is easy to spot the likely casualties: anything whose function can be fulfilled efficiently — if not more so — by a cellphone, computer or another digital gizmo. Taking photos, checking the time, making phone calls, listening to music, totting up numbers and hundreds of other activities can now be executed by the same small device rather than with a camera, watch, telephone, calculator, or whatever. Many of those things will disappear, though some may survive, but which ones? 

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