The Past and the Future

On Wednesday, I stood about a foot and a half away from a 1455 paper edition of the second volume of a Gutenberg Bible, at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.  The bible was open in a clear plastic case.   The display card bragged that the Morgan Library and Museum is the only institution in the world to possess three copies.  The book itself was printed with heavy, thick black and red body type in Latin, with an ornate first letter at the start of a passage, near the top of the right hand page.

The book in front of me was the first major work printed with movable type.   It changed the way knowledge was spread and preserved.  On the other side of the room was an even older tome, an illuminated European book of scripture from the eleventh century, with leather straps and clasps on the outside edges of the front and back cover, to keep the book securely closed.  I felt a sense of awe at the historic significance of the printed bible, and at the sheer age and the commitment of hundreds of generations of people over the centuries to keep the hand drawn religious book intact.

I also thought of Shirky's prediction (in his book and online) that the internet will make twentieth century journalists as obsolete as the scribes who made the eleventh century volume.  On a personal level, I wonder how many scribes became printers...?  Which is part of the reason why I took this class to begin with, since under Shirky's theory, my job as a journalist would seem to put me in the scriptorium, quill pen in hand.

Near the end of the final class, we discussed what the next big things might be on the internet.  Here are three predictions:

Wikis:  They have not fully flowered.  Wikis are a fundamentally new way of writing and thinking about information made possible by the internet.  I don't know what else can be done with them, but something interesting is possible.

Harnessing the tidal flow of information:  There is so much data flowing across the web, much of it about people in social media.  Marketers are interested in this info so they can sell more stuff to more people, but what other uses can it be put to?  Maybe new metaphors could help spur new ideas in this area.

New uses for mobile devices:  Twitter and Flickr seem like early uses, but this area is not mature yet.

I am still undecided on the overall hotness and coolness of the Internet.  The 1999 book Digital McLuhan by Paul Levinson (summarized here) described the web as being a very cool place.  But the web is a very different place than it was in the late 1990's, with more video and multimedia, in higher definition.  Many of the online trends we have discussed in class, from Wikipedia to Facebook, were set up after the book was written.  The conversion of audio, video, and text to ones and zeroes, and the ability to use them all in equal measure on the internet has created so many different tools that labeling the entire internet hot or cold would be meaningless.  As we did in class, the best approach is to analyze each kind of web site or service and judge them on their own traits.