Rick Myers points to an interesting piece about how we read online by Slate’s Michael Agger.
Near the end of the piece, there’s a link to “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal” by William Powers.
Here’s a clip from Powers’ 74-page document:
Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that
without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use?
All of which leads me to ask, do you pause to consider the medium you’re writing for? Do you write differently for paper? And who among us still puts pen to paper when forming ideas into coherent expressions?
