Technology has been an ever changing aspect of human society. It is developed to make life easier, and as time goes on things are improved upon and made obsolete. One such invention is paper. Paper made stone writing obsolete. It is the perfect example of one technology replacing another as to conform to the needs of Egyptian society and subsequently every society that followed.
To illustrate just how obsolete paper has made its precursor, stone, all one has to do is think of how often they see anything written in stone. It is perfectly natural too. Why would one carve out words in such a hard medium when one could simply write with ink on light weight paper? To add, why would one carry around stone slabs when one could simply pick up a book? The fear however, with a new technology, is that some things will be lost in the transition from old to new. In this case the artistry of writing may have been sacrificed, and there may have been some apprehensions about that. The pros of writing on paper far outweigh the cons however. Since its invention it has changed societies dramatically. It has allowed messages to be transported and read straight from the writer, whereas stone would be too cumbersome to transport and take too long to write on. In fact, the aspect of transportation is one of the biggest benefits of writing on paper. We certainly would not have books or newspapers if they had to be written in stone. Information would be a lot more difficult to spread if it weren’t for paper. My argument is basically that paper is one of the most useful inventions of all time because of its information sharing qualities, it has made stone completely obsolete.
As widely used as paper is today, will it ever become obsolete like stone did? In Howard Gardner’s essay, “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading”, He discusses how some people predict that because of modern technologies we may stop reading altogether. As far as never reading again as a society, I think not, however, the medium could very well change. He also mentions that people’s vast libraries could disappear because of new devices like the kindle, over time this could certainly happen. Having a vast library, like artistic writing in stone, could be gone in time due to new technologies. Now, also, with the new green fad, it’s not cool anymore to use paper, you have to save trees and prevent waste. In addition, the biggest advantage to paper, its easy transportability, is now being made obsolete with computers and Internet. A perfect example is email versus regular mail, deemed snail mail. Nobody sits down to write letters to people anymore, you can even pay your bills online.
With all this new technology will paper actually become obsolete like its heavy predecessor? Probably not. People need the ability to write whenever and wherever. Technology may be able to afford us that type of thing; however, can we afford it? A good deal of society is also obsessed with keeping written records because they just don’t trust new technology to keep it safe, a computer can crash, a post-it note can’t. So in the end, paper stands up to the test of time. It just has too many uses to be going anywhere, soon anyway.
Gardner, Howard. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading." Washington Post 17
Feb. 2008: B01. 17 Sept. 2008
content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502898.html>.
Innis, Howard "Media in the Ancient Empires" Communication in History. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. 5th ed.
Boston: Pearson Education, 2007. 23-29.
2 comments:
In various classes, I've been told that after a new artistic medium is created, it is only be used to mimic the old medium. However, after the new medium matures people start to exploit its unique qualities.
In your blog you say that paper might be replaced by electronic media. What, would you say, are the unique qualities that electronic readings have? In other words what can only be exploited by electronic writing? Inserting links would be one example, can you think of any others?
I totally agree with you that writing on paper isn't going to go anywhere for a while. Technologies shut down too frequently, and writing something on a piece of paper (although you could lose it) is way more reliable (in terms of keeping your information). Plus, with books, schools still use books and students rarely choose to have electronic books. Good blog!
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