Are Tablets And E-Books As Magical As Paper Books?

Imagine a world where people who practiced, possessed the ability to brighten or darken the atmosphere in the place they were with a gesture. Waving one's hands or a even a wand in the air to yield some kind of a result or occurrence somewhere else. By touch to be able to make things across the room come to life or once again become inanimate. 

Does this sound like a fantasy tale with impossibilities that we could never hope for? Think again because we're living in that world right now.

We can take a television remote and click a button to activate the television, turn on a stereo or perform a multitude of other things that would not have been possible many years ago through thin air. We can use a cellular phone to turn lights in the house on or off. Some houses have motion and temperature sensors that keep lights on in a room while they're occupied. We can take a video game controller and wave it through the air like a wand and magically it creates a picture or whole virtual worlds on the screen of your television in response. We can even gesture without a wand and speak words that activate other magic on your television screen, and control other appliances as such with devices like Sony's Eye Cam or Microsoft's Kinect.

We are living in an age filled with magic, though magic of a different kind that stems from our knowledge of the world around us.

Within this world, E-Books and Tablet computers have become immensely popular and are growing in popularity because that means one thing. That more and more people, kids, youth and adults are taking an interest in reading. A drop in readership of the paper counterparts to E-Books in this is a good thing as any magical Druid might tell you: "it preserves the living forest without losing the benefit of sharing knowledge and the many great stories that have been and are yet to be told".

The magic is contained in that act of reading because in that act, we are able to journey to distant places and experience things that we might never get to, but experience them almost like we did. Take the same E-Book and Tablet and read a comic book or watch a movie and it becomes a talking book with moving pictures. That sounds pretty magical to me though a different kind of magic than that of those who really invest the effort in understanding magic.

If Mila (the protagonist from my story A Lady's Perogative) used a Tablet, she'd likely use it for art and she'd find a way to use it that the people who designed it hadn't envisioned for it. That's another kind of magic. The magic of thinking outside of the bounds for which something is apparently defined.

That concept is more important than we realize and that is one thing that likely brings us much closer to real magic and wisdom.

Are we defined by the bounds of our membership or do we transcend those bounds and define them ourselves?

Magic does exist nowadays and it can be found in our technology. E-Books and Tablets are a magical thing because the idea of magic is found in sharing stories and knowledge and if we look a further and listen to those who've already tread the ground in search of the real thing, we might learn something wonderful.

So if hundreds if not thousands of years ago people were writing stories about these kinds of things, were they talking about their future/our present or were they talking about their present?

If we can look at and interpret colour images representing actual memories that are reconstructed in real time from MRI scans of our brain, then who is to say that there aren't people that have learned to do this without the use of a machine and read our minds?

If we can use magnets to invisibly push things around great and small from the metal arm on a fire alarm bell or the tremendous weight and load of a maglev train, who is to say that there aren't people who've learned to do the same things in a meager means?

I don't think that everyone who tries to explain experiences that they've had that most other people shrug off as nonsense are really as such. That is the nature of belief.

Chances are there are many people who have something to share that most who've ruled out the possibility of magic have lost.

Our imagination and our ability to believe.

The universe is alive with possibility so drink of it when you can and if you have a chance, why not read or play or write and create.