Fact: our knowledge is growing exponentially
Claim: the digital word is going to supersede completely the printed word in organizing this knowledge
This is virtually unquestionable for me but I wanted to write about it because I have seen people espouse very different notions of printed media. Some of them below:
1) printed media can reach more people in the world today
False. Delivering a book to all 6 billion human beings will take an unprecedented level of coordination. Not to mention that books are perishable items. Delivering to the roughly 1 billion human beings on the web right now is a matter of a few clicks.
2) printed media takes longer to produce therefore carries more respect
False. The bleeding edge of human knowledge has been the first to adopt the digital world. The vast majority of scientific journals are now published online, and many of them exclusively. Yes, there is a lot of misinformation on the web but there is no lack of respectable information either.
3) printed media is made by experts and thus more accurate
False. Wikipedia has shown people will structure knowledge for free and do it as well as paid experts. Take another example -- the taxonomy of living beings. In a few months Wikimedia (the non-profit behind Wikipedia) has catalogued over 100K species and has surpassed any manual taxonomy ever produced.
4) printed media will always more content because there is too much past knowledge that will not be digitized
False. Various scanning efforts are increasingly moving past human knowledge to the digital world. And if you go online today you will find everything, from broad interests like news and cooking to very specialized like how to make Ubuntu software work or the latest episodes of South Park.
So when the whole world is connected online, why would there be a need for printed material? Why would I buy a paperback when I can access the material much more easily through the web? Or read a newspaper when I can get fresher news online? I have a really hard time seeing printed material surviving. Except for cases where emotions carry more value, such as a rare manuscript or curling up with a book on the beach or giving a hand-written note to a loved one.
Food for thought: this amazing amazing video from Michael Wesch, a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State.
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1 comment:
ultimately, i prefer printed material to digital. perhaps i'm just sentimental, but also i just don't like reading things on my computer. as a specific example, i usually print out journal articles so that i can read them. it's easier on my eyes, and i can read faster with greater retention. the other important point is that i can take a book into the middle of the amazon jungle and read it fifty times over with no need for external inputs like power (an extreme example, of course). for this reason, i see printed matter distribution as less of a challenge than building the infrastructure and systems necessary to get people online in developing areas of the world. the benefits of books vs. solar panels, computers, and internet connections are of course different, as well.
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