http://heavenawaits.wordpress.com/bible-predicts-final-fate-of-gaza-and-palestinians/

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/alissa-walker/designerati/apple-ipad-name-not-winning-women

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Both works that we are supposed to read for this week’s blog post are curve balls. As they are not articles, it’s hard to find a direct purpose for which one can then write a blog post about. The piece about the Library of Babel got me thinking, though. The work, from what I gathered, anyway, is about a very strange library. Although the library does have physical confines, the author still pushes the idea that it is infinite.

I think the author means that the library’s infiniteness comes from the human element. Of course, one could go through and read every book in a library. However, the different responses and ideas that sprout from the books are infinite. The library in the story has odd hexagonal angles, a weird staircase, and mirrors to create the illusion of further infiniteness. The library described is almost like a smoke-and-mirrors game; the description and the “building” is so confusing that you begin to question what is real and what is fake.

With our modern technology, we have basically outgrown the need for a library. We have the Internet, which is most definitely infinite. You can always expand upon the electronic nature of the internet, which is something that one can not do with print (without, of course, reprinting the whole book). In print, one is confined to physical things and resources, i.e. paper and the labor of making the book. With the internet as our “library,” knowledge is truly infinite, and there are no need for mirrors and confusing angles to only make it seem so. With books available on transportable things, such as iPads, we can take knowledge everywhere. Thus, we are slowly erasing the need for a physical library at all. It’s obsolete. Ancient. Like Babylon.