NY.- Books help “balance or counteract” the enormous power of cell phones and screens: unlike them, the book is unaware of our ideas, has no information about us and does not constantly interrupt us with notifications, he explains in an interview with EFE the writer Irene Vallejo.
Vallejo is immersed in a North American tour to present the English translation (by Charlotte Whittle) of “Infinity in a reed”, a work of more than 400 pages on the origin and evolution of the book that has achieved a success that neither she herself nor the publisher can fully believe: translated into 40 languages, it has already sold more than a million copies.
After a series of conferences in libraries and universities in Canada and the United States -what he likes the most, to be able to take the pulse of the centers where the world is reflected on and transformed-, Vallejo says that the North American public has understood that his work It is not a hymn to the past or classical culture, but rather talks about things as current as the limits and challenges of freedom of expression.
Against the apocalyptic vision
Sitting in a New York park one bright spring morning, she says that she began writing “Infinity in a Reed” as “an anti-apocalyptic project, to contradict the gurus” who said that the book was finished in a world swept away by screens and the endless entertainment options.
Vallejo, an optimist from his very bodily expressions, wanted to show that the book, in its paper or electronic version, still has a lot of life ahead of it, as the “communities of readers” who make it clear throughout the world feel that there is “a cosmopolitan essence”.
He does not deny the dangers of technology when he compares a book to a cell phone: thanks to the search engines they are equipped with, phones provide us with content that confirms our ideas and flatters us into believing that we are part of a majority loaded with reasons.
On the contrary, books and literature “take us towards the other, they are the closest experience to getting into someone’s skin”; In addition, “they ignore our ideas when we are reading it, they have no information about us and they do not interrupt us with notifications,” he jokes, thus defining the book as the true refuge of confidentiality.
Even the e-book, when purchased on certain platforms, “gives you data like how many people have highlighted that paragraph or read a certain novel, how much time you spent on that book or where you left it. Imagine that in the hands of a dictatorial regime that can know what has everyone read!”
But in order not to sound pessimistic or ominous, Vallejo does not hate technology; He simply believes that there will be a place in the world for the book and the telephone to coexist, and what is important is that freedom of choice and access be guaranteed to all those who, whatever their origin or means, are thirsty for knowledge.
Social networks, the new agora
That Vallejo is a woman of her time who does not spend time denying modernity is demonstrated by her active use of social networks: she confesses that she posts all the time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok:
“It seems important to me to be in the places where people talk and where we interact, it is the agora of the moment and I do not do it out of sacrifice, but because I like it,” he clarifies.
Her objective is also to demonstrate that “a large community can be created on networks without using violence, without attacks and without aggressiveness”, but without shying away from debate: she herself does not hesitate to get involved in discussions, sometimes risque, and boasts of having taken a user who had started it with an unjustified verbal aggression to a more civilized terrain.
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