start of keyboard mediation
“Indeed, compared to the cataclysmic changes in society and business brought about by the new technologies of the end of the nineteenth century – not just rail, telegraph, telephone, and electricity but also the internal combustion engine, refridgeration, air-conditioning, photography, and indoor plumbing – the changes wrought by new technologies of the late twentieth century seem modest, an extension of the past rather than a break with it. Life is unthinkable without the advances of the nineteenth century. The same can’t be said of information technology. Ask yourself which you’d rather do without: Your computer or your toilet? Your Internet connection or your light bulbs?” Nicholas Carr,
Does IT Matter?
And reflect that the advances of the late nineteenth century, such as instantaneous communication, occurred in a context of authentic paradigm change. And the sidebar of the era was keyboard prompting of programmed technologies.
end of history
The
Internet Imaginaire, MIT Press, by Patrice Flichy is a wonderful critical history of socializations associated with on-line communication. The salient mediation studied is a threshold that disembodies the reader or participant. Why should this mediation, so typical of print reading, seem so distinctive on-line? Evidently both the persona and the social engagements on-line are much more hygienic.
There is magnificent review of the emergence of the Internet and the role of Wired magazine as of 2001. It is curious how adequate and complete this history, as of that date, feels. Perhaps the rapture merging the virtual and real, disembodied and embodied, utopian and commercial, has since occurred.
green reading
There is an extensive discussion of the comparative carbon emission associated with print and screen at
Long Tail. The FotB question here is what if the comparative energy accounting is based on a per-read unit over time? Remember that paper publications can be reaccessed for centuries. If you discount the housing overhead common to both servers and print books, a lower energy is allocated to sustained reading in print as compared with sustained reading on screen, especially as projected in centuries.