Visions of the future--what about reading?

A friend of mine posted in our school discussion board in which he talked about the future of blogging. (That is our discussion question for the week.)

He made some points that made me sit up and then made my heart weep...


I have often bemoaned the way journalism has slid into the mucky muck of opinion and bias. I tremble at the thought that we won't ever get un-opinionated news with bias words wrapped around it so tightly there is no way to get to the pure truth. Has relativism gone so far into our brains that truth isn't that pinnacle we strive for anymore? Does anyone get that vision of Pilate standing in front of Jesus with this doe-in-the-headlights look, "What is truth?" he asks Jesus. The Truth was staring him in the face and he could not even see it.

Vlogs were mentioned in the discussion. Vlogs are video blogs. I am not a fan of videos except for the very few exceptional ones that come to my inbox ever so often. What takes an hour to watch, I could get much more out of reading the text and doing it in 1/4 the time. I have a white-knuckled grip on my paperback books and I'm so afraid our future will be like Total Recall when the news is on 24/7 on the wall screen and no newspaper beside your breakfast coffee.

I'm also so extremely sorry that kids today "don't like to read"... what a lot they are missing!!! What kind of control over their imagination they are giving up.

There is a fellow by the name of Shane Hipps (you can view an interview here at YouTube) who talks about how we become trapped with images. When reading or listening to a story and you hear the words "an old man", your imagination takes off and conjures an image for your mind that can be as wild or staid as you care to be. Yet, if someone says, "an old man", and hold up an image then they control your imagination and your creative thinking stops at the image (Shane, 2011). Creativity is trapped.

Our minds are great and glorious things because God created them that way. I am not saying that our creativity stops, it just doesn't have to work as hard when we look at images. So is creativity going off in a different direction? What is the point of having an imagination if we just sit and watch TV or a movie or YouTube videos? That puts us in that realm of someone telling us what to think about. Will it come to the point where everyone is watching the monkey, but only one or two have their eyes on what is really going on?

Hipps, S. (2011, April 14). Interview with Shane Hipps: The OAT Podcast. Spring Arbor University.