Information Revolution...

This week two things happened in conjunction that made me feel as though I am standing (and living) on a divide between yesterday and tomorrow.

First, I'm finishing my finals and in one class, media design, the final was on typography design and type foundries.  The computer technology publishing software has created a huge leap in design. During a break, I went to the storage unit (not in New York -- in the West where I am right now), and I pulled out one of my old writing files.  With two big moves in six years, much of our stuff is in storage. Unlike now, where I file everything electronically and digitally, I stood over boxes full of photographs and scrapbooks to pull out one article, "The First Information Revolution" from Civilization magazine, dated 1996.  "After 13th-century Paris scribes began churning out large numbers of portable Bibles, reading and scholarship changed forever." Unlike all the research for my final -- all digital, all online -- I held this paper in my hand, full of information about how knowledge was passed, printed on the pages.

Fleet Street in London, in St. Bride's Church, was the location for the first printing press.  Johan Gutenberg's moveable type revolutionized printing and the book and how information was produced, shared and how knowledge became accessed and circulated.

Today, type gurus like Matthew Carter, who trained in England using metal type and who became most famous by designing the font used in U.S. phonebooks, straddled time past and time future.

As I realized that I now keep most of my photos now in digital format and haven't worked on scrapbooks in four years.   I stood amidst boxes of printed information --- how we worked and lived for centuries -- printed books, printed papers. What information will be digitally lost as file types change and software and computer/camera upgrades take place?  Holding paper in hand, touching photos...

Information was and has been tangible and touchable and visible.   Time Magazine's Person of the Year is You, according to the cover story, and perhaps, with blogs and YouTube, everyone can publish anything.  But I think the crux of the matter is a much bigger revolution where information will be ethereal.  If Parisian scribes put information into text for wider circulation and the printing press took it further, technology now makes information a flood and working with it an entirely new science and way of learning.  We access it, store it and work with it digitally.  Except for books.  Books on tape have kept cassettes in circulation, only because unlike DVD's and CDs, you can stop, start, rewind and forward with greater ease.  Digital books haven't happened... yet.  My books in storage might maintain relevance.

Comments

[Izzy]

The whole "digital revolution" makes my head spin. I remember learning about the ASCII and EBCIDIC (sp?) in college and I specifically remember learning, well before college (I started college in 1985), that the next big thing would not be gold or oil or anything tangible but rather, information. Whoever predicted that was so right that it's scary.

[Lauri]

Interesting. I just taught 5th graders this week about the Renaissance this week...