Everything I do is reminding me of my research paper.
And it’s not because it’s due next week *cries*
Recently, I’ve become slightly obsessed with Hulu’s new series The Handmaid’s Tale. As such, I was startled when one of the themes in this show related to my fascinating topic on how students imagine the library.
For those of you who haven’t seen the show, I will now provide a brief synopsis of it WITHOUT GIVING AWAY ANY SPOILERS.
Basically, the show takes place in a dystopic version of the United States after it suffered a dramatic decline in healthy pregnancies, environmental problems, and was overthrown by a theocratic, totalitarian, and patriarchal government to “restore natural order”. The United States as we know it is destroyed and women are stripped of their power in a number of ways — one of which is the ability to read.
In this society, books, magazines, and even street signs have either been destroyed - or confiscated - in order to prevent women from reading.
In one episode, the main character Offred is illegally given the opportunity to read — something she hasn’t done in years. As I watched Offred desperately grasp a magazine like a holy artifact — an object I normally regard as a piece of trash — I was struck by how much we take for granted in regards to print sources.
I started thinking about my research and how many students seem to ignore books on the shelves, but obtain digitized versions of text from the computers. As students, we naturally look online first and if that fails us, we’ll try the library to find a hard copy as a “last resort”. As a result, it seems our society is adjusting to this demand by giving us the ability to create, store, purchase, and collect digital texts online so that it’s easier for us to access through our devices. If everything is available online, will we even need those traditional hard copies anymore — especially if they aren’t being used?
While I personally have little trust in writing papers on my prehistoric laptop, I feel more secure writing and storing everything in Google Docs. This way I know that if my laptop crashes, I’ll still have a copy of my work no matter what computer I’m on — as long as I have the internet.
But what would happen if we didn’t have the internet — if it just disappeared one day?
In one of my earlier posts, I wondered if the way students use the library as more of a place to do homework rather than a space to collect research might change how libraries look in the future. I wondered if libraries might eventually be buildings filled with computers — yet void of books. It seems like the demand for digitized versions of text are rising and as a result, businesses are changing their ways to save money and stay competitive.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred was given a magazine to read — something she believed had been destroyed with every other form of text. This made me wonder — what if everything was only available online and not as a hard copy? How much easier would that be to destroy?
