If all forms of media were to disappear, I would only miss the books. Good riddance, I say, to the internet that makes my brain feel like a poached egg, to the apps on my phone that absorb me when there is so much more to be done, to the gossip magazines that line the grocery store check-out aisle and, in my opinion, encourage suspicion and lies even among those of us who aren’t celebrities. I would only miss the constant ping from my cell-phone telling me that a friend had texted me for a moment before moving on and appreciating the world around me.

In the morning, rather than lazing about in bed with a phone or a novel, I might actually get up when I woke and make my parents breakfast, just to be nice. The recipe would have to be simple, without the use of a cookbook, but maybe I would actually get around to learning how to make eggs or pancakes. I would probably be able to get up earlier, too, since the previous night would not have been spent watching YouTube videos into the early hours of the morning, and lights out might actually mean going to sleep.

Once done with breakfast, I would go outside. A radical idea, I know, but there would be very little left to do inside the house. I could finally explore the woods and waterway behind my house in full, without any worry that I was going to miss the latest episode of “The Amazing Race” on television. Instead, my time would be spent turning over logs and otherwise learning and getting dirty. Maybe I could even discover some new plant or animal species that I had never seen before, while crawling about on the sun-baked earth. While chasing scuttling beetles and colorful newts, I could appreciate just how blue the sky is on a summer day, or how a field of grass appears to be a vast emerald ocean as it ripples in the wind, with little white sailboats of clover bobbing barely above the surface.

When I grew tired of that, I could head over to a near-by friend’s house. We might go out and do something, or maybe just sit and talk about the things we had done earlier, or that we were planning to do in the future. Whatever it was we chose, it would be together, not just near each other as so many relationships are spent now. Without videogames or phones, we would be forced to connect with each other.

Someone might spontaneously invite my family over to dinner, since there would be fewer plans to get in the way of leading a more social life without the fear of missing a favorite television program or spending time watching a movie. The sense of community that so many of my elders reminisce about and many younger people wish for would be achieved. There would be a camaraderie that we cannot have today, when everyone is nearly constantly plugged in.

Of course, this is an idealistic image. No one ever complains of the horrors books do to children’s minds, but they, too, are a form of media. Some might believe giving up our novels would be like giving up a balloon in order to enter a zoo: upsetting at first, but then totally worth it.

However, to surrender books would be to surrender much of the world’s history. Often, literature is the only clue we have to the culture of ancient civilizations, and most schools teach out of textbooks, at least in part. We would have to rely on oral histories, and those don’t tend to be the most reliable sources. How can we learn from the past, if the only record we have of things is a rough estimate that has been scrambled as it has been told through the centuries?

Not that there would be much of a school system anyway, without a strong government. The USA’s constitution would be nonexistent, and that would cause some obvious problems. It would be easy for any government that attempted to keep control to become corrupt if there were no specific and permanent laws because you couldn’t write them down and make them public, not to mention that communicating these laws to all the people in a county would be near impossible without the internet or even a newspaper to make an announcement official. Even with people still being able to travel across the globe and talk to each other in person, rules and regulations would become very localized.

It is easy to see only the negative side of media as it begins to consume our lives, and we paint beautiful images in our mind’s eye of a world where everyone is happy and connected to one another without a screen in between, but to give up everything would be to give up the good and necessary as well. Books are a well-appreciated and established part of daily life, and rightly so. I believe that other forms of media, such as television and the apps on a smartphone, will become very much the same, and that we only need a little while to figure out how to balance a physically and mentally healthy lifestyle with its use. If everyone were to spend every waking moment with their nose in a book, complaints of missing out on real life would be made just as they are for the iPhone. With some responsibility, media could become a true benefit to every aspect of our daily lives.