Ever since man learned to write, he began to do literature. Since then, creation has being going through diverse forms, epic and lyric poetry, dramatic or comic theater, essay, narrative, but it has always been aimed at filling a few people's leisure spaces. Never many people's. Most people's leisure spaces of are filled with quite simpler and elementary forms, such as games, music, alcohol, embellished boredom and simple voyeurism, not necessarily linked to sex. But the second industrial revolution, that of communications, has come to alter this idyllic and perfect picture that went on next to humanity until late in the Common Era's Nineteenth Century. When, radio, cinema and television appeared, everything changed. Not because of the cinema, which is after all an idiotic form an idiotic form of theater having been gradually forced to lodge itself in television, but rather because of radio and television, both allowing the most to exhaust leisure without leaving their homes. An when the two worst embryos, movies and television, coupled at their turn, many soothsayers were able to say that literature was sentenced to death. But they were wrong. In reality, literature, rather than dying, has been renewed; it has grown stronger since cinema and television appeared; this is mostly so with narrative, for it has found new forms of expression and multiplied its possibilities and roads. The truth is that what television has done is to alter the forms used to fill the leisure of the most, because the few, as always, keep needing a book, letters, written words, as a stimulus and a way for the mind's development.

And we must clarify something important here: letters have been one of the determining factors of human intelligence's full development, and one of the reasons why mankind has been dominated for thousands of years by European and European bound culture. An the reason is entirely physiological: reading accentuates intelligence. The need to translate, within the brain, signs into sounds, then becoming words that, when combined, make ideas, is a huge and important exercise which, just in the same way as a mechanical and recurring action develops a specific set of muscles, develops the thinking brain. In this sense, then, it is clear that computer science, inasmuch as it uses letters, words, phrases and sentences, is as useful to intelligence as books are and, far from competing with literature, it becomes its best ally. Why? Because it may ultimately make many of the many turn to the band of the few, with the ensuing increase in the readers' market when the level of the people's intelligence grows as a general rule. And the fact is that the addicted "couch potato" who withdraws form the silly box, even if it is only for an hour every day, and replaces it with the intelligent box, stops becoming dumb and goes on to develop his mental capacity. In this sense, one should understand that a computer's screen, although it may physically resemble that of a television set, may be strictly the opposite as to the effect it has on its users. Television builds idiots, since the viewer does nothing to understand what he is watching. The image says everything, and just as the weight lifter risks increasing his adiposity when he stops using his muscles, the human being who stops reading and just watches television faces the risk of becoming a dubious imbecile, unable even to fight leisure with simple tools such as games, music, alcohol and embellished boredom, and condemned, as an idiot to simple (ele)mental voyeurism.

In conclusion: computer information systems do not kill literature but rather help to develop it; and this is not just from the readers' side, but also because today's writer has in the computer, in the hardware —however you may call a machine such as the one I am now facing and that you will have when you read me—, a wonderful tool to develop new writing techniques. The rest is nothing but a failed prophecy, just as those that announced the death of literature when the movies and the radio came to life. And television.