Rotten Apples

I saw a headline in a local paper titled "The End Of Books". The article was about how the Ipad would herald in a new way of reading that will ultimately lead to the end of printed books. Slowly but surely easy access to knowledge will be curtailed from the poor. Because if printed books were only to be made available in electronic form the poor would have an even grater disadvantage to accessing knowledge. Because if someone wanted to read a book they would first have to purchase an electronic reader, a phone plan, or an internet package with a wifi router. Already those from poor areas have a hard time accessing knowledge, look at the state of textbooks in poorer neighbourhoods, so now with the ipad damming all printed media that will require all students or a school to purchase ipads. Some schools can barely afford computers.

Meanwhile these companies get rich on the backs of miners who slave away in mines for tin that is used to build these devices but I digress...

Yeah, sure when I was young and watched Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Jake had a pad with all his books on it, I thought it cool, and it is cool in the world of Star Trek where money is no longer used and the entire human race works together for the good of humanity; but in today's world the great divide between rich and poor is growing even wider. Actually I believe soon there will be no middle ground just stinking rich and working poor.

We cannot turn everything over to electronic media, what will happen when those systems inevitably crash???? Knowledge should not be confined to a select few. But in the end what can be done??? Most people are too concerned with basic survival to even notice what is happening in real time.