What's the difference between reading a book and watching television?
Reading is a tactile experience. You touch the book, hold it in your hands, and feel the slightly rough paper on your fingertips when you turn a page. You feel the weight of the volume and somehow know there's another world waiting for your entrance. A television sits across the room with its pitiless eye ordering you to pay attention.
We read books in quiet places, or with soft, unobtrusive music that adds to the experience rather than interferes. Television offers sounds designed to manipulate. Sounds that suggest you are not smart enough to know that something is about to happen, or that you missed the point of an event.
When reading, you can take a break and reflect on what you've read. Television rips you from the story and offers ways to clean your floors or not so subtly suggests if you want to enjoy life the way the happy people on the screen seem to, ask your doctor for a drug.
Books are quiet friends that can sooth or stretch your imagination. They require you to participate in the experience. Television asks nothing from you.
Books are disappearing. Computer screens are replacing them, but that's the lesser of the evils. Fewer and fewer people are reading, and reading skills are deteriorating across the country. Can a civilization exist without books? My guess would be that the civilization would be dull, intolerant, unimaginative, and very afraid. Take two books and call me in the morning.
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