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> Instead, the physical space currently occupied by books could be used to promote communal activities, between kids and between adults. There are public buildings like that in Barcelona, that can be used by cultural neighborhood associations that allow the people of the city to bond in much the same way that ancient communal places like the church would have performed. So, for example, food distribution citizen cooperatives, or role playing/board game groups, singing and dancing groups, theater play associations or courses, historical recreation societies...the sky's the limit! What you're describing is the function of many public libraries in the United States, especially in the last 30 years. At least, one of the major functions: a place to meet, a place to study, a place to take classes, a place to get resources about social services, a place to sit inside when it's raining and you don't have a home to go to. When I said that switching to a digital model would eventually diminish the role of libraries, I was thinking about this exactly. The literal loss of a shared community resource. But I am also noting that there are almost certainly knock-on effects of having such a place that we don't fully understand, and would not understand until years after we'd lost it. I am thinking, abstractly, about the consequences of over-indexing on a particular metric, at the cost of everything else. Especially everything else which was not known or considered in the original problem statement. If our metric is "access to information", we could maximize that by getting rid of books and focusing exclusively on digital lending, and we could call it a success. What I'm saying is: have we accounted for everything that would happen if we actually did that? As a species, we're pretty bad at guessing these things. We thought the internet would make us more civilized, we thought social media would bring us together, etc., etc. This starts to sound like a Chesterton's Fence argument, and I was trying to avoid that, but there's no denying it now. That's basically what I'm saying I guess! |