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I spent the other night hanging at home with my friends, chatting and drinking dirt-ass-cheap champagne (because we’re classy, you see). For one reason or another our conversation drifted to the Kindle. I’ve always wondered why I never warmed to Kindle like everyone else seemed to. My friend Kenna provided a succinct, practical response to that question that I wanted to post it here.
While everyone else’s parents just adored the Kindle, all four of us hated it. Kenna reasoned:
“I think we’re the generation who knows how to use technology right. It’s so much a part of our lives that we feel comfortable finding new ways to use it–like Twitter or Facebook. But our parents can only understand it if they use technology to replace something else that they’re already familiar with. So they feel comfortable reading books on a Kindle, but we don’t.”
Kenna may be on to something but I do quesion the “how to use technology right” idea. I am more in the older generation camp
even though I use email a lot, some texting and the occasional
facebook entry. I think the main ‘fear’ of my gen and older is
putting too much information about yourself out there for all
to see.. whereas the younger gen seems to have no problem with
that. Are the youth more open aand therefore more honest? Or are
they oblivious to the fact that they may not want everyone they
know, in different capacities, parents, employers,friends to have
access to the same information. Isn’t it just common sense that
we don’t talk the same or show the same pictures to our boss and
our best friend? As technology improves, for example facebook
is not unrestricted access, then those fears can be subsided.
Perhaps the younger gen need to explain those details – how it really works – to their parents. That’s if they want them to log on – maybe not
As for books, it seems that there are people that really like the
physicality of a book – one book at a time, whereas there are those who just want to have the convenience of multiple books in one place. Is that generational? She is definitely correct in saying that the older people would “get” a Kindle a lot quicker that Twitter becasue they know exactly what it is used for and supposed to do.
That’s a good point re:overexposure on the Internet. I’d definitely agree that the older folks have a good deal more discretion (and, ahem, common sense) than high school/college-age students.
But I’m still unresolved as to why people seem so polarized about the Kindle. Yes, the older generation can more easily embrace the Kindle than, say, Facebook, because they know what it’s for. But the younger generation knows what it’s for, too, so why haven’t they shown the same enthusiasm? Maybe it’s the price tag. Maybe it’s that I’m polling an extremely small sample of people. Maybe it’s because the younger generation has spent so much time looking at their friends’ photos on Facebook that they’ve forgotten how to read. (joke?)
E-readers are pretty amazing things and will hopefully phase out textbooks (said by a student), but I don’t see them ever replacing print completely. They couldn’t ever duplicate being able to flip between a dozen spread out pages without being overly complicated, or being able to work without batteries.
However, I’d put the kindle into a class of it’s own. While I think that giving the kindle a free wireless connection was pretty pimp (to use the proper nomenclature) it meant adding in hardware that increased the overall price, size, and power consumption. Plus I don’t think the kindle can even read pdf’s or get any book except through the world wide web (I know this to be true on some of the older versions).
What I’m getting at is e-readers provide a potentially inexpensive way to get alot of books and carry them all around with you at the same time, but currently they’re too expensive, the devices are inaccessible (often only reading strange file formats), and did I mention they’re expensive?