China is considered to have been the first country (civilization) to have created the modern version of paper. Paper is listed as one among the four big Chinese inventions (the other three are compass, gun powder and printing). Perhaps it will be the first country to desinvent paper too.
"The oral system could neither transmit information over time, nor do it accurately. "
I think you're very, very wrong about that. For fun and a different point of view from someone who actually practiced oral culture, check Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing.
Which came to us via writing, of course. It's true that oral culture won't leave a trace when it ceases to exist, but it's pretty arrogant to claim that it can't transmit information over time (while its people are living).
You're also wrong with the idea that the stone is even better material for the posterity (meaning trasmission to us). It's hard to work in the stone, so it has never been used for much. Clay tablets, on the other hand, are a fantastic medium for us. When invaders come and burn the city all paper is destroyed, but clay tablets become preserved because burning the clay extends the legibility of the writing for a few thousand years, at least.
If it somehow escapes the fire, the writing media ends up in the soil while waiting for us to come along. Organic matter like paper can't survive in that environment for a few thousand years, but clay can. Although it has to be burned rather quickly after the excavation because it can't survive for long in the current atmosphere of our planet after all that time underground.
And because of that we have a lot more preserved writings from the bronze age than we have from classical Greeks or Romans. Almost nothing remained of the paper writings that they made. Archeologists are extatic if they manage to find two paragraphs somewhere. I kid you not. Paper does not survive for two thousand years. It might in an atmosphere without moisture and oxygen and that's how a piece or two become found from time to time, but such finds are very infrequent.
What we do have of classical writings mostly comes from the copies made by cultures which survived them. Or the quotations in works of authors from other cultures. Which is why we have a bunch of "fragments" from some work, but not the whole work.
In short, paper is probably the worst known physical medium for preservation of texts to time intervals which are of interest to archaeology.org. Our digital devices are fragile and can't live for long, that's true, but paper is much more fragile.
And the future archeologists would probably be reasonably happy with weird digital devices that require reverse engineering in order to read them. I'm sure you know the name of the guy who reverse engineered that stone which illustrates your article. That's what they do, after all. And then their names are thought to kids in schools. What's not to like?
And for the shorter time frame: since we're heading into WWIII, it will become obvious to everyone that relying on the availability of the electrical power grid for things like money and essential written documents isn't a terribly good idea, so adequate adjustments will be made. You'll like them if you live to see them.
Libraries and archives have been dealing with the question of the longevity of digital repositories and how to best preserve documents. Back ups already exist and some are in paper. Old websites are preserved -- Internet Archive is such an initiative that needs funding.
Publications such as journals and reference books are nowadays digital with a reason - instead of reprinting updates and thus using paper, the updates are immediate and accessible (especially if Open Access).
Print and digital can coexist, but need to be thought through. Tactile books are special and necessary... Written word is written whether in digital or print format. And a digital publication can also have text, film, audio...
I believe (or want to believe) that people ate slowly realising that physical media is essential, not only as documents of our time, but especially as protection from eternal surveillance, control, and narrative manipulation.
My son is a programmer and he's fed up with the digitalization of everything - and well aware of the hellhole awaiting us with programmable digital money.
There are others like him. I hope there will be many others in the not so distant future.
Incurre en una falacia: que todo el conocimiento e información estén en formato electrónico no aumenta el riesgo de desaparición de informaciones o conocimientos concretos respecto del papel
I deplore the development for personal reasons. I can't use smartphones, can't use touchscreens, find these gadgets too small and too unwieldy at the same time. Possibly because I'n not used to them from childhood, but possibly also because I have bad fine-motor skills and a congenital damage of my optical nerve that makes it difficult to read on a screen. This has never bothered me before, but since the explosion of smartphones it has made me positively handicapped.
They say society adopts more and more to disabilities - but it also creates new ones.
Ted Chiang's short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling did an excellent job examining the benefits and detriments of written vs oral traditions and the value of forgetting in society and I think about it often. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling
Moreover.......what happens when there is a legthy power outage, and even if material is stored on a computer the time is imited for accessing any content. Bad weather can make solar power unreliable.
One nice thing about Substack, at least, is that you can download and back up and hopefully later disseminate that information.
I wonder if paper might see a resurgence. Paper disappears because it’s inconvenient and expensive, but the economy and convenience of digital text is precisely what makes it so vulnerable to LLM-generated spam, which is already clogging up DDG and other search engines. (The value-added uses of the technology are considerable, but require human involvement and so aren’t cheaper.) Maybe it’s optimistic to hope for a turn to paper as a sign that someone at least went through the effort to make a physical copy.
"The oral system could neither transmit information over time, nor do it accurately. "
I think you're very, very wrong about that. For fun and a different point of view from someone who actually practiced oral culture, check Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing.
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing
Which came to us via writing, of course. It's true that oral culture won't leave a trace when it ceases to exist, but it's pretty arrogant to claim that it can't transmit information over time (while its people are living).
You're also wrong with the idea that the stone is even better material for the posterity (meaning trasmission to us). It's hard to work in the stone, so it has never been used for much. Clay tablets, on the other hand, are a fantastic medium for us. When invaders come and burn the city all paper is destroyed, but clay tablets become preserved because burning the clay extends the legibility of the writing for a few thousand years, at least.
If it somehow escapes the fire, the writing media ends up in the soil while waiting for us to come along. Organic matter like paper can't survive in that environment for a few thousand years, but clay can. Although it has to be burned rather quickly after the excavation because it can't survive for long in the current atmosphere of our planet after all that time underground.
And because of that we have a lot more preserved writings from the bronze age than we have from classical Greeks or Romans. Almost nothing remained of the paper writings that they made. Archeologists are extatic if they manage to find two paragraphs somewhere. I kid you not. Paper does not survive for two thousand years. It might in an atmosphere without moisture and oxygen and that's how a piece or two become found from time to time, but such finds are very infrequent.
What we do have of classical writings mostly comes from the copies made by cultures which survived them. Or the quotations in works of authors from other cultures. Which is why we have a bunch of "fragments" from some work, but not the whole work.
In short, paper is probably the worst known physical medium for preservation of texts to time intervals which are of interest to archaeology.org. Our digital devices are fragile and can't live for long, that's true, but paper is much more fragile.
And the future archeologists would probably be reasonably happy with weird digital devices that require reverse engineering in order to read them. I'm sure you know the name of the guy who reverse engineered that stone which illustrates your article. That's what they do, after all. And then their names are thought to kids in schools. What's not to like?
And for the shorter time frame: since we're heading into WWIII, it will become obvious to everyone that relying on the availability of the electrical power grid for things like money and essential written documents isn't a terribly good idea, so adequate adjustments will be made. You'll like them if you live to see them.
Libraries and archives have been dealing with the question of the longevity of digital repositories and how to best preserve documents. Back ups already exist and some are in paper. Old websites are preserved -- Internet Archive is such an initiative that needs funding.
Publications such as journals and reference books are nowadays digital with a reason - instead of reprinting updates and thus using paper, the updates are immediate and accessible (especially if Open Access).
Print and digital can coexist, but need to be thought through. Tactile books are special and necessary... Written word is written whether in digital or print format. And a digital publication can also have text, film, audio...
I believe (or want to believe) that people ate slowly realising that physical media is essential, not only as documents of our time, but especially as protection from eternal surveillance, control, and narrative manipulation.
My son is a programmer and he's fed up with the digitalization of everything - and well aware of the hellhole awaiting us with programmable digital money.
There are others like him. I hope there will be many others in the not so distant future.
Incurre en una falacia: que todo el conocimiento e información estén en formato electrónico no aumenta el riesgo de desaparición de informaciones o conocimientos concretos respecto del papel
Thank god at least Wayback Machine exists.
I deplore the development for personal reasons. I can't use smartphones, can't use touchscreens, find these gadgets too small and too unwieldy at the same time. Possibly because I'n not used to them from childhood, but possibly also because I have bad fine-motor skills and a congenital damage of my optical nerve that makes it difficult to read on a screen. This has never bothered me before, but since the explosion of smartphones it has made me positively handicapped.
They say society adopts more and more to disabilities - but it also creates new ones.
What is the problem with presentism?
Ted Chiang's short story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling did an excellent job examining the benefits and detriments of written vs oral traditions and the value of forgetting in society and I think about it often. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling
Moreover.......what happens when there is a legthy power outage, and even if material is stored on a computer the time is imited for accessing any content. Bad weather can make solar power unreliable.
One nice thing about Substack, at least, is that you can download and back up and hopefully later disseminate that information.
I wonder if paper might see a resurgence. Paper disappears because it’s inconvenient and expensive, but the economy and convenience of digital text is precisely what makes it so vulnerable to LLM-generated spam, which is already clogging up DDG and other search engines. (The value-added uses of the technology are considerable, but require human involvement and so aren’t cheaper.) Maybe it’s optimistic to hope for a turn to paper as a sign that someone at least went through the effort to make a physical copy.