Burn the Libraries
A lot of people think that libraries are obsolete and should be burnt.
After all, who needs books when you have the Internet? Everything you need to know is on Wikipedia. Reading novels is a waste of time anyway. Books are relics of the past, when people needed to stoire information somehow but didn’t have computers. The Internet is so much faster and you don’t need to get up of you seat to get it.
If you decide to remove all the libraries, you’ll be in good company. This company includes the Spanish when they invaded South America, Hitler, the Chinese when they invaded Tibet, and many other conquerors. All took it upon themselves to burn the libraries and books.
Their reasoning was a nit different though. They felt that they needed to destroy the information contained in the library, since it would taint the people’s minds, and they may turn against their eminent leaders. They needed to remove or change history because they didn’t like it.
After we’ve removed all the libraries, the job for such a dictator will be a bit different. Say Hu Jintao got a bit senile in his old age and decided to adjust history a bit, by removing the massacre of Tianmen Square. He would only need to filter out any reference to it by installing a big firewall on the internet cable into China. The next step would be to put up some information to replace it, for example, The Tianman Square miracle, where the Evil Tibet Monks launched an underhanded terrorist attack on the unsuspecting unarmed Chinese students in the square, and the heroic Chinese soldiers fought them off. Quite easy to do, put up some archived news stories and a few websites. Modify some pictures and put them up too. No one needs to verify the info, edit it and insure its of a high standard. Children reading it may learn to spell and may learn their grammar according to whatever bad spelling and grammar habits the author had.
The problem with books is that they just don’t lend themselves to modification, so best just to get rid of them.
Take Wikipedia. It turns out that you can go there right now and change whatever you want on it. Then, the next unsuspecting person will learn whatever you have decided is a fact. Quite useful if you’re a dictator, an evil rumour mongerer or simply a person intent on destroting knowledge. And if you are Hu you might just buy Wikipedia to make it easier.
Books, of course, are all rigorously edited and verified, the grammar and spelling corrected, and can be trusted to be a reliable information source. This is because they’re expensive to produce, so no one wants to produce rubbish. Also, even after publishing, books became approved references by experts.
Which really means that if you want some quick, unreliable and highly probably wrong information, the Internet is your choice. If you want the truth, unalterable and lasting, the library is where to get it.
So unless we value our freedom, our knowledge built up over the past 2000 years, and truth and integrity, we need to remove those libraries taking up so much space, and replace them with far more useful computer cafes….
After all, who needs books when you have the Internet? Everything you need to know is on Wikipedia. Reading novels is a waste of time anyway. Books are relics of the past, when people needed to stoire information somehow but didn’t have computers. The Internet is so much faster and you don’t need to get up of you seat to get it.
If you decide to remove all the libraries, you’ll be in good company. This company includes the Spanish when they invaded South America, Hitler, the Chinese when they invaded Tibet, and many other conquerors. All took it upon themselves to burn the libraries and books.
Their reasoning was a nit different though. They felt that they needed to destroy the information contained in the library, since it would taint the people’s minds, and they may turn against their eminent leaders. They needed to remove or change history because they didn’t like it.
After we’ve removed all the libraries, the job for such a dictator will be a bit different. Say Hu Jintao got a bit senile in his old age and decided to adjust history a bit, by removing the massacre of Tianmen Square. He would only need to filter out any reference to it by installing a big firewall on the internet cable into China. The next step would be to put up some information to replace it, for example, The Tianman Square miracle, where the Evil Tibet Monks launched an underhanded terrorist attack on the unsuspecting unarmed Chinese students in the square, and the heroic Chinese soldiers fought them off. Quite easy to do, put up some archived news stories and a few websites. Modify some pictures and put them up too. No one needs to verify the info, edit it and insure its of a high standard. Children reading it may learn to spell and may learn their grammar according to whatever bad spelling and grammar habits the author had.
The problem with books is that they just don’t lend themselves to modification, so best just to get rid of them.
Take Wikipedia. It turns out that you can go there right now and change whatever you want on it. Then, the next unsuspecting person will learn whatever you have decided is a fact. Quite useful if you’re a dictator, an evil rumour mongerer or simply a person intent on destroting knowledge. And if you are Hu you might just buy Wikipedia to make it easier.
Books, of course, are all rigorously edited and verified, the grammar and spelling corrected, and can be trusted to be a reliable information source. This is because they’re expensive to produce, so no one wants to produce rubbish. Also, even after publishing, books became approved references by experts.
Which really means that if you want some quick, unreliable and highly probably wrong information, the Internet is your choice. If you want the truth, unalterable and lasting, the library is where to get it.
So unless we value our freedom, our knowledge built up over the past 2000 years, and truth and integrity, we need to remove those libraries taking up so much space, and replace them with far more useful computer cafes….
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