authentication
Florida will return to
paper ballots. Paper in libraries and elections provides a trail of authentication displaced by screen based representation.
where is Waldo?
The Bill Gates posting of a
da Vinci manuscript illustrates a continuing question. As on-line representations of print and manuscript culture increase study and engender new meaning, where does this new meaning reside? FotB suggests that new meaning resides not in the on-line surrogate, but in the physical original.
fallicies
As a regressive print advocate I enjoy the many fallacies I encounter about new reading, new writing and new publishing. I actually have a list of these excellent fallacies, all of them too simple to be true.
Popular fallacies of screen reading advocates
1. There is an analog/digital divide in the technologies of information transmission. (If there is any divide at all it is between paper and screen based reading.)
2. There is something distinctive about being “born digital”. (All information is born digital. How it grows up provides the distinction.)
3. We are experiencing a one-way transition from paper to screen. (Its actually a two-way, not a one-way transition.)
4. Screen based books can be equivalent to print books. (This assumption overlooks legibility, haptic and persistence attributes of print transmission that are not achieved in screen reading.)
5. The only history is the future. (Every revolutionary functionality of the book awaits rediscovery out of the past.)
6. The print library is obsolete. (Knowledge is in between books. The physical print library can be read and studied across time and cultures as relationships between books.)