"The sensory side"

Lynn posted a link today to The Mystery of the Phantom Page Turner, which is an interesting article in its own right (more on that later), but a phrase in it struck me.

A collector of paper-knives (which are what the so-called page-turners actually ARE) talks about the differences between how Victorian readers and today's readers experience reading (esp. in the age of the Kindle) and he remarks: "Sometimes I worry that the sensory side of our lives is dying out"

I never thought of it that way exactly but I admit I have a similar concern. Everything is so "virtual." I wonder, for example, if toys are dying out - replaced by apps or by 'virtual' things that you can manipulate, sort of, in a virtual space. I mean, I get that the minimalist parents would LOVE that - no toys to yell at your kid about picking up, no Barbie shoes cluttering the pristine house - but I also wonder about what it does to a child's development. I can see in my students which kids were allowed to "tinker" and build stuff and do things like take broken pocket watches to bits (my brother and I were, and you learn fast to be careful about the mainspring on the manually-wound types).  Some students just aren't *comfortable* in lab handling the glassware and equipment, and you find out that they weren't the kids who played with LEGO or who built tree forts. (And this is becoming worse, with the rise of "virtual labs" in some schools, where EVERYTHING is done online. Another side effect: students don't learn what a beaker or a graduated cylinder is for, and I catch people trying to do precise measurements of a fluid in a beaker WHICH IT IS NOT MEANT FOR, so I have had to go to a first-day glassware tutorial in my lab classes....)

I also think that stuff like playing with LEGO or building with blocks or sewing doll clothes or the hundreds of simple make-it games kids played for years help give a person a comfort with problem-solving in the real world. Oh, I know there are problem-solving video games (and recently, apparently, video games have been rehabilitated from "they rot your brain" to "they might make your kid smarter and might even help ADD kids...") But I don't know that they have a long enough track-record to show that a diet of JUST video games allows for people to learn problem-solving in the same way as kids who get to do more unstructured play. (And yeah, I admit, some of this is me being a suspicious Luddite here, but I've seen too many instances of rooms full of kids sitting there pushing little virtual candy-shapes around on a screen and *not interacting with each other* and it seems kind of weird to me.)

But even beyond the question of building brain pathways, there's the pleasure of the sensory. One of the reasons I have thus far rejected e-readers (even though they would be so easy for traveling) is that I LIKE books. (and I have a lot of books, and it would irk me to have to re-buy a book in an electronic format.....I feel the same way about the whole vhs to dvd to blu-ray to whatever new format, maybe digital? thing with movies, where every 5-10 years you have to re-buy your "favorite" movies in the new format unless you can keep the old player for them running....and the whole idea of digital media that you don't really own in physical format, and which could, presumably, be taken away given a copyright dispute or some such....)

One of the reasons I knit and sew and everything else is that the sensory pleasure of working with fiber soothes me. I suspect one could get a similar "repetitive relaxing motion" with some kind of Wii game (I think some performance-artist actually coded a Wii Knit game?) but the motion is not the main part I find relaxing.

And I get that the move is to make everything virtual, so we can all go live in our Tiny Houses and be happy with having no actual stuff, because then we can....have 'experiences'? Which seems to be the big thing the tiny house people talk about. Well, I'm nearly 50. I'm learning I'm kind of physically fragile in some ways - I can't canoe any more, I don't like to camp, my balance is too poor for long-distance bicycle riding. I'm not a big fan of traveling to strange places (the logistics, when you are a single woman, can be complicated, unless you do tours). I don't have a lot of friends to play music with or "game" with or go out dancing with.....my comfort in life, honestly, is coming home at the end of the day to a nice, properly climate controlled house* and sit in a comfortable chair and either read a book or knit or sew. Or play my piano, which is a by-God, acoustic, made-nearly-100-years-ago wood and wire piano that still requires tuning and can be temperamental when it's humid. (Just like I can be, in fact)

(* I had to put the AC on last night. It was 77 F in the house and 58% humidity and with me being perimenopausal and starting to have night sweats.....I had to)

Though I'm not sure I'd want to go back to the overstuffed Victorian era (for one thing: no on-demand hot water, for another, no air conditioning). But also, I'm glad I don't have to cut the pages of my books when I go to first read them. (The supposed page-turners - which I guess people assumed were part of Victorian propriety, so they wouldn't have to TOUCH the pages of a book someone else might have touched - were actually paper knives). Paper knives were used to cut open the pages of the book - the way they were bound, pages were done on a fold, so you had to separate the pages.

I actually knew that already - one or two of the very old books I picked up different places, some of the later pages were uncut. Or in one or two cases, more recent books had a few pages that escaped the cutter and which I had to manually separate. And again - I wonder how many people now are familiar with that concept. It does seem in some circles a certain ahistoricality is fashionable, and that makes me sad, not just because while the past doesn't repeat itself it does rhyme, but also, I think by learning about mistakes of the past we can maybe avoid re-making them, but also by learning about our pasts, we can honor it and honor  the people who came before. For example: I learned that one of my great-grandfathers was illiterate until his early 20s, but once he learned to read (after he married), he was never without reading material. And I see that as an object-lesson of sorts: it seems to me that being deprived of something for so long, he wanted ever after to take advantage of it.

And as I've said before - one of the reasons I like knitting and quilting is that they are activities my ancestors did, and they would recognize me doing today. Oh, rotary cutters weren't around when my great-grandmother was making quilts (but I bet she would have loved to have one), and circular needles didn't exist when my distant ancestors made sweaters for their families - but wood is wood and iron is iron, as Roy Underhill once said, and I think that's why I like those traditional crafts.

And while I don't think they're directly in danger of being lost (seven million, or however many it is now, Ravellers can't be wrong), still, I wonder if big swathes of our population are buying too much into the "virtual is just as good as actual" mindset, and are finding something missing from their lives as a result....