Hard Cover vs. Hard Drive Essay -- Compare Contrast Writing Technology

unwaveringly C all everyplace vs. Hard Drive Will Electronic Publications Ever Replace the Book? At one m our world was strictly an oral culture. We recited stories, kept records stored in our memories. When writing was invented did we suddenly stop speaking to one another or remembering facts? Of course not. At any given moment we thunder mug recall, from memory, names, dates, and places that we have committed to memory. When the printing press was invented, did we stop writing by hand? Again, no. So, why would we stop reading a record book just because we have access to the terra firma Wide Web? each previous information technologies of language, rhetoric, writing and printing are technological in themselves (Landow 218). These technologieswriting, speaking, typingmay seem second nature, but given time so will the Web. There are reasons for choosing a book over the Internet. To make that choice, first you must ask yourself what material you want to read, and why you want to read it. Then you can more easily comment the best medium to read it on. It appears that electronic publications are generally both read by unlike people than those who read printed works, or are used by them differentlyor as compliments, but not competitors (Pang 344). If I want driving directions, for example, I could pull out my atlas and look through the pages of roads Ive never heard of and landmarks I have ever seen. Or, I could go to www.mapquest.com and simply type in my starting point and final destination and get exact directions and milage along with a map of that specific area in a matter of seconds. This is just one instance where the web is the choice over a book. A great manyperhaps mostbooks do not contain literature, the arts, history, or even... ... distinction, Im not sure. perchance I have more respect, even a sense of duty, to the serious music writers. At any rate the movement to embrace new engineering science will not be a movement from somethi ng natural or human to something artificialfrom nature to technology, and George Landow puts it, since writing and printing books are astir(predicate) as technological as one can be (Landow 219). The World Wide Web has just given us a different forum to experience text we have come to love and see on. Works Cited Tribble, Evelyn B. & Anne Trubek, ed. Writing Material Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. New York Longman, 2003. Landow, George, Twenty transactions into the Future, or How Are We Moving Beyond the Book? Tribble & Trubek 214-26. Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim, The Work of the encyclopedia in the Age of Electronic Reproduction. Tribble & Trubek 343-51.