By Benjamin Gorisek-Gazze, Year 12
What is better for storing and sharing information, physical books or the world wide web itself?
This question has become quite the popular topic.
In the age of the fastest technological growth ever seen, physical information storage systems seem to be becoming less and less useful, instead replaced by web-based alternatives. Newspapers have moved online, social media has revolutionized long distance communication and even books have migrated to platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle. Have all of these ‘advancements’ rendered books obsolete? Well, not quite. Rather, they have simply evolved along with us.
It should be noted that the objective of this article is not to place books and the internet on two sides of a scale and having them go head-to-head. In fact, the aim is to simply reject the idea that these systems are separate at all.
Communication of information is the founding principle on which the success of humans as a species was built. It started out quite simply. All that was needed by a prehistoric human was a wall and some good old-fashioned creativity to convey their ideas almost 65,000 years ago. It may have taken a while, but by 3000 BCE, papyrus became the easiest way to store information, and soon after, modern paper was introduced, around 2000 years ago.
The many methods of communication used by humans differ in various ways and over thousands of years, and yet, they are fundamentally the same. Pictures with special meanings are placed on a semi-permanent surface. This is the fundamental constant that is shared by both books and the internet.
It took 60,000 years for humans to evolve to using papyrus, however it took just a few thousand to make the shift to using modern paper. From there, inventions like the printing press and typewriters made the serialization of books much easier, to the point that mass duplication and sharing of information were simple. It is therefore not so much of a stretch to differentiate the era of books before these inventions from the era of books after.
Similarly, the internet is the next generation, growing with us, and speeding up the process of our cognitive evolution. It was in 1983 that the internet was created, and at the time it functioned solely as a standard method of communication between computers, an idea that was revolutionary at the time. Now, you can call someone from across the world in real time, instantly publish information that is easily accessible to everyone, and all functions from reading to shopping have been brought online in one way or another.
It suffices to say that this popular question is in itself flawed. While both books and the internet certainly have their disadvantages and their benefits, there is no progress made from questioning the value of one system of communication under the lens of another. They all feed into each other, based on our growth.
