I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
Interpretation
The quote expresses concern over how screens limit traditional reading and negatively impact the reader's experience.
Philip Roth's quote reflects a critical opinion on the evolution of media and its effect on reading habits. He suggests that the advent of various screens—first in cinema, then television, and now computers—has diminished the quality and depth of reading, ultimately harming the reader's engagement with literature. This perspective raises questions about the implications of modern technology on our consuming habits and cognitive abilities.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of technology on learning, this quote can be used to illustrate the drawbacks.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
But the idea that some day people would want to be able to interact and get stock quotes and talk with other people or all these different things, I just believed that was going to happen
... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.
My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
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