We've reached an interesting watershed point in our technological development. Not too long ago, all media was interpreted physically - ink on a page, light on a photograph, or the sound of a musical instrument being played. Those experiences are all now digitally mediated, and without that silicon interpreter they no longer even exist.
I seem to recall a bold defense in a 1980s pornography case which was based on the fact that videotape on its own was meaningless, an anonymous greyish-black magnetized coating on mylar. It was only when the tape was dragged across a tape head and the results displayed on a cathode ray tube that the content could be considered obscene, so the production of the tape itself was innocent of wrongdoing. Sad to say the plea was unsuccessful*, but in my mind there's some truth to the hypothesis.
After all, in the case of a suitably comprehensive global disaster, the only use for a Kindle full of ebooks would be as a possible source of fish hooks**, content rendered useless by the final death of the battery, whereas paper-based books would retain their meaning and utility.
But surely not all the media of the computer age would be lost! Walter M. Miller Jr.'s brilliant novel
A Canticle For Leibowitz describes a future dark age in which racing forms and electrical blueprints have become the apocrypha of a new religious order. Imagine instead the digitally-inspired religion of the post-apocalypse!
Picture if you will: a ruined monastery, its cracked walls shored up with street signs, fragments of concrete, and corrugated iron, the ubiquitous building materials of the end of the world.
Within the patchwork walls, a tonsured novice kirtles up his robes, mounts an ancient bicycle and begins to pedal. As his speed increases, the generator attached to the rusted chain in place of a rear wheel start to hum. With a crackle of sparks, a scratched LCD screen flickers to life, and the assembled monks of the Order of Netflix™ once again reverently watch the temptation of Saint Chandler by Rachel, the Lilith of the Old World, and his rejection of the evil temptress in favour of the Blessed Monica.
I leave the question of Phoebe's status as demon or angel as a decision that each of us must make according to the dictates of their conscience, and the tenets of their faith.
- Sid
* Normally I'd say that the defendant didn't get off, but that seems inappropriate for a porn trial.
** How unfortunate that you would be unable to use a Kindle for kindling.
