The world's most powerful graphics chip

"It runs on the world's most powerful graphics chip: imagination."

Sheldon's line gets a big laugh, but he makes his point. In a world of new media, and intricately scripted photo-realistic first-person video games, the thirty-year-old medium of text-based role playing seems hilariously quaint. At the same time, though, if we can set aside our skepticism and immerse ourselves in the experience, we can still enjoy the same thrill we did back in the 70s and 80s.

It's easy to panic in the face of new media. We think of it as a tsunami, obliterating everything that comes before it (and with the next new wave perpetually approaching). Eisenstein gives our fears some welcome historical context: the end of the book has supposedly been upon us for centuries, yet the book persists. The new doesn't necessarily displace the old. Journalism didn't end the book. Movies didn't destroy live theatre. Television didn't put radio out of business.

That said, does Eisenstein's faith in "the ineluctable persistence of the past" have a best-before date? I do believe we'll still be reading Jane Austen in a century's time, even if we're not always doing it through ink and paper. We may even still be reading John Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut. I hope there are many Austens, Steinbecks, and Vonneguts yet to be born. But, will those unborn authors express themselves in book form? And, if they do, will their efforts find an audience in the ever-increasing flood of data that vies for our attention? Will the work of future authors achieve its own "ineluctable persistence," or flicker briefly only to get washed away? And how will we continue to focus on long-form narrative fiction? After all, these days people worry that the two-minute YouTube video has been irreversibly supplanted by the six-second Vine.

Eisenstein's reassurances don't fully quell my worries, clearly. But I try to balance my apprehension with excitement. We can wring our hands over the ever-increasing pace of the changes we confront. Or, we can embrace the best of what's new, and cherish and nurture the media that continue to speak to us. I have faith that we will sort things out, one way or another. I have faith that we'll keep reading novels, seeing live theatre, and going to movies featuring human stories and human actors. And we'll be experiencing new media that we can't even envision yet. 

And, we will still have the Sheldons of the world, who find ways to thrill in the power of their own imaginations. We will still have text-based RPGs. We will still have LARPers and cosplayers. The world's most powerful graphics chip will keep on ticking.

We can also cherish new media's technical tools that allow us new outlets for our creative instincts, and new ways to connect with an audience. Before the written word, everybody had equal access to state-of-the-art storytelling technology: the human voice. For centuries, though, we surrendered much of our own storytelling instincts to those who controlled the media. Now, storytelling capacity is gradually moving back towards the masses (at least in the developed world). For now, much of that capacity is devoted to cat videos.

Bonus reading: New York Times writer Leah Price muses that books may survive, but that libraries may disappear—in her 2012 essay "Dead Again."