Is Print Dead? or Just Dying? Part II.

The rise of computers does have its detractors. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues that the internet may, by its excess of information, do little to solve the problem of information glut. “Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies.” Baudrillard says.  “In other words, it has an infinite capacity to process data and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.”

Those who make the argument that the digital medium will never trump the written word also point out the inherent unreliability of electronic hookups, faulty computer equipment and information that is scattered across several servers. Pen on paper is more concrete, solid, trust worthy. “To err is human,” said a participant in a BBC radio program in 1982, “but to really foul things up requires a computer.”

Still, many people argue for the great advantages of the digital medium over the printed work: the ability to follow links quickly in a fashion that more closely resembles the associative nature of the human brain; the power to share information in the fields of medicine and science and the capacity to pinpoint information in several minutes that might have taken days or weeks in the stacks of a library.

 For those feeling a little nostalgic about the days when you could curl up by the fire with book in hand will be with e book in hand. It is hard to tell whether a class room in the year 2100 will consist of students who need only come to class with stylus and e book in hand. It is also likely that people will still read books on paper in another 100 years for the sense of authenticity that only a book with dog eared pages and a history of individual readers can confer. Then again,   some point out that the printed book is the text’s container, not its essence. Moreover, e books will cost little, never go out of print, and always be at the ready online.

Is Print Dead? or Just Dying? Part I.

As our society moves further and further into the digital age, will it mean the end of the printed word? Future antiquarians sorting the effects of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, trying to determine how the printed word of ink and paper came to be largely replaced by pixilated letters  on glowing screens, might stumble with interest upon an article by Vannevar Bush in the  July 1945 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. the article titled “As we may think, “ spoke of the increasing difficulty for anyone who attempted to fain information in a way  Bush insisted that humans needed a new way to thread through the abundance of information available a method that would not use a paper and ink.

He proposed a machine called a’ memex,’ which could create links of associations that the used could follow as his or her interests see fit. “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear; ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them ..,”

Here, almost 30 years before its launch, lies the idea behind the World Wide Web, which now includes almost 100 million people around the globe in its virtual community. People not only can conduct research online but send mail to each other, chat with instant messaging services, and create web communities that are no longer bound by physical geography.

Will the names of Vannevar and Licklider (“who wrote a 1968 paper  proposing an “ intergalactic computer network”) be as revered in the 24^th or 25^th century as Johannes Gutenberg- the German inventor who opened the way for the democratization of knowledge with the 1436 creation of the moveable type printing press is to us today?  Will computer networks, with their speed and their vast resources of information and video, make pen and ink, books and paper obsolete?