A Great Medium

Written by Ben on November 2, 2005 | 2 Comments

The world is developing a new Library of Alexandria (LoA), which we call the Web. One can see this by looking at the user contributed online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Both the Web and LoA have collected, stored, and disseminated the accumulated knowledge of humanity.

But computers are fragile. From harddrive crashes, to California’s rolling blackouts, to dumb net outages, we find that computers are unreliable. They die all the time and at the worst times. We will take this assertion for fact to further the discussion topic.

So I pull out my Fisher Space Pen and a pocket moleskine when the computers fail. This illustrates the key difference between the Web and LoA. The key difference was the pen and paper. It is funny that I am in love with this low tech approach when my life and career resolve so much around computers.

Paper as a medium is something that doesn’t need any infrastructure or special hardware (except a pen/pencil) to use. The process of making paper is down right simple.

Paper is easily transported. Our global postal system is built to send paper based mail. Heck, paper is so useful that the modern workforce uses more of it after the office computing revolution than before.

I can go on and on with examples of how great paper is, but I’ll start to sound like a crazed loon. Let’s just say that I am asserting the fact that paper is key to our society.

But I glossed over a tiny tidbit. The LoA burned to the ground. Paper as a media is still fragile, but less so than computers. Next up, how do we overcome the inherent fragilities of paper? More specifically, how not be put in a position to need to bootstrap society.

2 Comments

1. this reminds me of the interview with Ken Burns on The Colbert Report. What will documentaries of the late 20th/early 21st century be like? V/O of emails(assuming it hasn’t been deleted)?

   Comment by Nick — November 8, 2005 @ 11:03 am

2. [...] It has been some time since I proclaimed a love for pen and paper. My followup, as promised, covers a bit about paper’s survivability. That survivability being non-existent. The twist here is that the goal isn’t to make paper survivable, it’s to ensure that the written word on the paper is. [...]

   Pingback by Badpopcorn » Paper, Biology and Computing — December 15, 2005 @ 4:12 pm

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