advent of the delete key
As regards books, digital technologies and network communication have advanced print reading much more than screen based reading. This is because print reading began with a more refined installed base and was quicker to take advantage of the production and delivery attributes of digital technologies. In addition the print book was already optimized for linear assimilation of conceptual works. Assimilation in screen reading, however, was forestalled by a need for rapid and extensive deletion of presented material. In fact, the advent of the ìdeleteî key itself marked the transition from analog to digital technologies. A simple demonstration of the current inefficiency of screen reading is the Google search. The reading process requires a skill set for rapid deletion or de-selection of results with very little opportunity left for efficient assimilation of concepts. This is a crippling circumstance for screen based reading and it may be endemic.
mindless libraries
Promoting digital ìlibrariesî at the expense of print libraries suggests a malapropism, but supplanting organized, browse-inviting print collections with blank stare, empty search boxes should never occur in a Library. There is a reason they call it “searching” and not “finding”.
“Focused browsing in classified bookstacks, enabling scholars to simply recognize what they cannot specify in advance, remains crucial to advanced scholarship. Google Print [Book Search] will be a wonderful supplement to classified bookstacks in real research libraries, but a terrible substitute.” Thomas Mann
Silly supercessionists are at play with the destiny of knowledge. There is not even enough administrative leadership to consider the multiplicities and promise of interacting print reading and screen searching.
“Online browse displays of subject subdivisions are the kind of things real users would kill to have in Internet searches – but Net search engines simply cannot produce them. This radical advantage is available to researchers only in library catalogs.” Thomas Mann
Read every word reported by
Thomas Mann. The LC administrative agenda is an eerie replay of the sillyness of the Role of the Artfact which also attempted to discredit the role of print. But that was just a conceptual contest. The current campaign to digitize libraries by destroying the classification of books is a physical threat.
Then again, what better place to introduce a new dark age than in libraries? See also
Dark Ages America and
Dark Ages Ahead.