Week 3 - History of the Book response

It is necessary to divide out the cultural linguistic understanding of what text based language is with textual narrative. Text is a created and aggreed upon visual representation of human language. Like any other form of language, it is constantly evolving. Evolving in the Darwinian sense, not the social evolutionary sense. This evolution does not make textual language better over time, it only changes it. Textual narrative is the process of using this language to create and structure social meaning. 'Books,' be they papyrus scrolls or e-readers are used to store this textual narrative.

It is interesting to note that historically any new technology for transmitting this narrative is predominantly first used to plagiarize works and disseminate pornography. Yes, technology changes, but basic human behaviors and motivations do not. It is said our society now is creating more knowledge in minutes than entire previous civilization's created. We will need to find convenient and appropriate ways to store and transmit this information. We're doing the same things humanity has always done- creating narrative, transmitting culture; we're just doing them in different ways now. Each narrative, book, scroll, and so on has it's own meaning in situ. It is not so much that the item or language is changing and updating, our beliefs surrounding it are as well. Books used to be similar in value to serious hard currency, one could tell how wealthy one was by the number of books in their collection. This monetary value of books is not currently viable because culture has changed and therefore our value of our artifacts has also transformed.

Linguistic mediums do not generally die, they just adapt along with the new mediums introduced. Photography didn't kill painting, radio didn't end writen documents, television didn't kill radio, and the internet has not killed television. Our usage patterns changed, but the fundamental linguistic technology remained sticky.