Books are more democratic than television

I just watched an episode of jPod. As the credits rolled, I thought to myself "I really need to get out and buy that book." Immediately after thinking that, though, I realized that reading the book would ruin the show, because I'd know how it ends. But then, my reasoning went, Douglas Coupland is such a fantastic writer. There's probably way more in the text of jPod than there is in the show. After all, I love Douglas Coupland books for their tiny details. And tiny details don't show up very well in TV and movies. If they make it at all, they take a backseat to larger points of plot or mise en scene.

That's what makes books so much more democratic. When reading a book, everything is equal. Everything is just another set of words on a page. Tiny details get the same love that large events get. They have to, because everything comes in sequential order. Things that could happen simultaneously on a screen are forced to go one by one in books. And that's fantastic. It means that the tiny details work. It means that I really get to think about what the room looks like, if that's something that matters. Instead of simply seeing, the sequential nature of books forces me to process, to acknowledge, and to understand.