Life is going paperless. You can email instead of writing a letter and mailing it. You can take a picture, download it straight on the computer and upload it to an online album for others to see. Why send a fax, when you can scan and email as attachment? Why subscribe to a newspaper, when mashups and portals are freely customizable with real-time RSS feeds?
Well, recently they also invented an e-book reader. Contact the publisher online, buy the book, and read it from the software. A book-sized slate of plastic. You turn pages as a real book, keep a marker where you last drooped-off, and now can even exchange your books with friends!
But in all this, don't you feel we are losing something? For example, with everything going online, I miss the sense of touching a newspaper. That fragrance from a book: new ones, those from the library and the ones from a second-hand seller all have their own distinct aroma, and it doesn't really take an avid reader to tell. I'm sure all those who grew up in India like me would now be thinking of how the daily newspaper felt. Crispy just like the morning, one would gleefully think! Tea or coffee next to you, and newspaper in hand, is how our day would start. If you think of it now, you'd feel they should give that smell of paper, a distinct name; as one entitles a new perfume fragrance.
(Ahem) Coming out of my reverie, I think technology-wise, we are in the "middle of things". The next strides will be to give humans this feel of how it was before computers (and more specifically the internet) came into the picture. I'm sure very soon the they will be able to trigger aroma in the brain of the reader. I read recently about an audio set which is also connected to the chest to trigger emotional impulses (http://immerz.com/). Toshiba comes next year with a 3D TV for which you would not need glasses.
It shouldn't be a decade before you get to look at a flower on your tablet computer and smell it too! Well let's take that a step further: to touch it too! And feel the same fragrance and touch as if that flower for real. Well, it better turn true, for by then those flowers itself will be few and far-fetched, as would libraries and bookstores, and (unlike) the tablet computers today!!
