A response to "Being Digital"

This is a reading response to an article titled "Being Digital" When bits replace atoms.

After reading the entirety of this article, which in my opinion droned on a little too much for my taste, I mostly thought about what the world and it’s media would be like when it is mostly digital. I don’t see things like books or magazines to be forgotten anytime in the near future. However, maybe one hundred years from now, when the “digital copy” of a book or written story will be the norm, things might not be so different.

For instance, there’s the deal with placing a tax on something that is digital or not. I don’t know if that’s still an issue, but I remember a while back when going to Gamestop to buy Microsoft Points for my Xbox, there was a fifty percent chance that the tax on it would not be on it. The deal was something like “can you charge tax on something that isn’t technically a physical object?” Sure, you can say the piece of plastic the code for the points was on is physical, but that isn’t what you bought. You bought it for the digital points so that you could buy and unlock games on the Xbox marketplace. When the world becomes mostly digital, I believe tax will be charged on everything. Unless of course our economy is back on track at that time, then maybe there won’t be any taxes at all. Who knows?

All I really know is, when the all-digital age is here, everyone will have bad eyesight from staring at screens all their lives. Except for me that is. I’ll stockpile all the cheesy romance novels in my attic.