I want to be a journalist

When I shifted into AB Literature (English), all I had was an appreciation of literature and art and an itching interest in theories and products of critical thinking. However, it has always been a personal practice to have something practical in hand. Literature is highly theoretical, dealing with relationships often existent only in consciousness. I can’t handle living on that alone especially the nightmares of living as a hobo with no apparent real-world function. (Yes, pop culture created a laughing stock out of  an art major's futures) Years in the sciences has always fostered in me a hunger for something more material.

A sticker from a passenger tricycle along Katipunan Ave, Q.C.

I chose journalism. It was a decision not founded upon flipping a coin. In fact, I’ve always wanted to be a journalist. I had a rather (insignificant) fun stint when I was in high school when I wrote for a regional daily. I wrote about personal interests but it did not last long. But, this summer, it has been arranged that I will be working for the same press as an intern as a journalist-in-training. Score!

I’ve been wondering why I’d like to go to journalism. It’s like when you taste chocolate and you want more but you don’t understand why. Under scrutiny, you will realize it is the paradoxical quality of bitterness and tastiness that keeps you above your weight goals. For journalism, it is being able to relay human experience through words. Often, when you read a news article, you are bombarded with information as if you are expected to simulate it around a reader's environment. Maybe it is just my own sentimentality but I think being able to relay reality through words is a wonderful thing. Of course, “reality” here is always in question but to transmit emotions, no matter the “truthfulness”, is just great. (I am not saying that news is just realist fiction, I just acknowledge that forces skew it, and I believe that it is these forces that gives them the human quality.)

Of course, I am not an expert but you can quote me at your own risk. If you check my Kindle, I have style books and handbooks on journalism. I’m reading about it and I’m very interested so far. You can’t imagine the joy I experienced when I discovered you can create folders on the bookmarks bar of a browser. I have a whole folder for links to online newspapers.

Amazon Kindle - Setting paper on fire

I was never a technophobe, in fact, I had the opposite “phase” in high school which peaked when a network administrator confronted me regarding irregularities in the network structure of the school. Apparently, I was a suspect and I wasn’t entirely innocent. However, when the e-readers came around, I was extremely skeptical. I only got a Kindle recently and let me tell you exactly how terrifying the “migration” is for someone belonging to this liminal generation.

I’ve always been comfortable reading physical books. Even though our elementary library was very selective and utopian (it would condemn anything with an expletive), it was easy for me find a shelf I really liked. It was a good thrill waiting for the next installment of The Magic Tree House book to be returned by a fellow reader. The library I was subscribed to then decided it only gets one copy of each installment and it was always a race; the winner was awarded the top cell on the borrower’s card housed in a pocket at the back of the book.

Physical books, apart from the written material in them, is an object. It was something that existed in a specific place at a specific point in time. Tangible and highly limited, only one kid can read it  at a time.

I decided to get my Kindle because I am almost sure that I am a classical reader. The Project Gutenberg website that houses free digitized versions of relatively older (but genius) books is paradise for me. The Kindle isn’t the first time I’m reading digital. I have used my Macbook and my iPod to read whole books I couldn’t find in libraries or stores.

The first book I’ve read on the Kindle is Mary Shelley’s brilliant novel “Frankenstein”. It is highly thought-provoking, forcing me to consider the importance and the dynamics of the relationships between the created and the creator. The Kindle was an entirely different experience from reading off a laptop or a music device. Apart from the paper-like screen (e-Ink, Pearl, whatever its name), it was a device supposed to replace books. I can’t acknowledge the notion that it is made to be used as a supplementary with the book. It is a proud device! It is light, can store a crazy amount of books, and reads like a book (except for the seizure-trigger every flip of a page)!

The Kindle is brilliant. It was easy to read using it, it is conducive to the development of bad habits such reading while walking because it is very convenient to lag around. The weight and the size is divine. I personally think that everyone who loves literature must get a Kindle. It is a cheaper, more earth-friendly way of devouring the classics. However, it does not provide the threat of a paper cut, a feeling that adds a thrill to the book.

The Kindle does not set fire to the paper, rather it heats up an argument in my head.

Of course, there is that purist, highly conservative part of me that dismisses the digital as a destruction of the production of good books. Digital production is way cheaper than printing. You just convert a file into an e-book and boom, you have a “book”. This wasn’t the case when Dickens emerged. A physical book can’t be (easily) duplicated. The copy-paste is probably the murder of the library. Yes, there are online systems that allow only one person to access a book at a time but the physical existence of a library is lost. Again, a murder!

There is also the practical (or lazy) side which chooses convenience. The Kindle allows obtaining of free e-books. New titles are on illicit sources I do not suggest but it is possible to get new books for free. Apart from being selfish, literature becomes a public domain. The internet becomes EDSA where people just have to look up to read Austen, Shelley, Camus, Freud, etc!

Of the millions of people transferring into e-books from books, please do not do so blindly. Reading is a wonderful thing; change however, is dubious.