The book with the culture of the audiovisual

Relatively recently finest educators, beyond the visual phenomenon, kept saying that "culture" could go anywhere, but frankly their culture came almost exclusively from books. In his view, had so many books to read and written so much science in all libraries were shut, and libraries, such as branches of the temple were sacred booksellers, young priests, and writers, prophets. That was our faith. The high culture reproduced the characters of devotion, sacrifice, tenacity, meditation, ecstasy, as demonstrated in the fervent centenraio of Don Quixote, faithful reproduction of a Holy Year in which the text was reached through the jubilee.

Our ancestors were more egregious because the books and we grew from the printed page and the printed page. Does the radio? Does television? Does the photograph? Is the cinema, even? These media (now called "communication" rather than culture) were elements of entertainment, not sources of knowledge, strictly speaking. The know-again-was kept on the books meant to aim higher and use more of them out in a convent or a prison, in an attic or under an almond tree.

In the context of capitalist production above (with savings, deferrals, capital accumulation, sexual repression) was essential reading, served to believe rich without spending, without taking the train traveler, adulterer without social scandal, man of letters as a synonym for wise, But now that file is finished and obviously not for destruction of mankind.

Before reading what he taught and healed all we ever larger morally humanize us, we polished and finished leading us even to the Revolution. The reading was for us, readers of all life, as the balm of Spitfire. Humanity improvement, according to the old orthodoxy educator still on the payroll, if you read. Sometimes they showed tolerance towards those who watched television (documentaries, TV news, historical series, debates), but how any such pasati8empos compare with the incandescence of the lines of a book?

The illustrated book on the legend is the inner journey, reflection, self-consciousness, as distinguished, freedom, rebellion. All without distinction, often, if it is a good book or not and usually referring to the novel on which it could not lie higher royalties.

A population of a country it is ignorant if its half does not read even one book a year. But how to maintain this simplicity in the very complex audiovisual stadium? Only the blind and the deaf culture could do. In this case, the vision fata joins the few wanted to listen. Thus, the video game, for example, no matter how it is always poorer, but the book, no matter how it enriches. This simplistic he hates what is believed not know, obviously, for the higher culture. But actually do not know. Those who have not practiced with the games we have assumed that his difficulty lay in the speed of handling and eye coordination and moviviemnto hands. The truth, however, for most video games is that their interest and complexity found in deciphering the rules that are learned throughout the process.

Reading a book is always follow a story foreshadowed while accurately replicates the video game avatar of life, with sequences that are created and formed from the action of the player. Compared to viedojuego, which requires constant action, the book is presented to the new young consumers as a leisure too passive and submissive.

With the game are players in the intrigue of the plot, while the book feel just looking on what is happening. Certainly the book has superior advantages in terms of enhancing the imagination and inner universe creation, helps to develop concentration and is, without doubt, the best medium for the transmission of certain information. But all these qualities are probably those that lead to avoid him in the culture of consumption and faster which, after all, replaced by the characteristics of the game, they are creating another mentailidad and other skills. Different skills, in short, to perceive and develop decisions on a different reality.

Young people better decipher the heterogeneity of the great modern cities are less able to read a book more intricate but fast-paced and insightful in interpreting promiscuous surfaces, physical and virtual, or both at once. The boys, in short, as the world has evolved, not wasting time in the game: win and lose the view to accommodate the culture they belong.

Verdú, Vicente. Me and you, luxury items. The people: The first cultural revolution of the XXI century. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2007. Page 29-31