Out With the Old, and Out With the New

Consider the case of Sydney, Australia; a beautiful city, renowned for its laid-back lifestyle, sparkling beaches, and a traffic jams that would try the patience of the Buddha himself. It wasn’t always that way. At the turn of the twentieth century Sydney was served by an efficient network of light rail routes, and electric trolleys plied the streets with regular schedules that allowed pedestrians to hitch a ride to their destinations with ease. After the introduction of the automobile, however, the light rail lines were slowly destroyed by city leaders who wrongfully figured light rail was extinct due to the popularity of cars. Now, choked with people and far more personal transport machines than any of its streets can handle, Sydney is spending billions to reestablish the tram lines they once discarded.

We could learn a lot from Sydney’s experience in prematurely declaring a device as obsolete. Throughout recorded history, mankind has been marking down the wisdom of its members on a series of analog media, such as a cave walls, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, and sheets of parchment. In each case no one has advocated the destruction of the old format once the information was transferred to the new. After the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century, scholars were tripping over themselves as they collected handwritten manuscripts to allow for careful editing and widespread distribution, but somehow we cannot envision Aldus Manutius tossing a parchment copy of Ovid into the shredder once the printed volume was done.

But today is a different story. Never before (with the exception of recorded sound ) have we seen the wholesale destruction of an information format like that practiced by contemporary Information Scientists. Somehow their faith in zeros and ones has eclipsed their confidence in the printed word and their destruction of the codex is accelerating as more and more material becomes “digitized” and readers are directed to pay-per-view websites to find the text once physically available on the shelf. But someday, just like Sydney commuters, people may find that perhaps the old format was really the best, especially as they continue to shell out millions of dollars for libraries to rent the information they once owned.

Now pardon us as we go back to listening to a selection of music on our eight track tapes...