Word: gutenberg
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When the personal computer first entered the classroom three decades ago, prophets of the information age foretold a marvelous revolution. The world's storehouses of knowledge would become instantly available to young minds. Captivating digital landscapes would bring history, geography and science alive on a screen. Not since Gutenberg, they exulted, had there been such a powerful new tool for learning. Their bold predictions were not wrong, just premature. Computers are indeed everywhere in American schools, but they are generally used as little more than electronic workbooks for drill, or as places for kids to play games during ``free choice...
...editorial pages, glossy, brash Wired magazine takes the position that information wants to be free. It runs articles arguing that Gutenberg-era concepts like copyrights and patents can't be adapted to something as fleeting as digital expression. But Wired is a lot less freewheeling about its own intellectual property: it has bullied smaller publications into dropping the word wired as the name of a column. Now the newsletter Information Law Alert reports that Wired once tried to trademark (the symbol universally used on the Internet to separate a user's name from his domain) as the magazine's logo...
...likens netwriting to the literary scene Mark Twain discovered in San Francisco in the 1860s, "when people were reinventing journalism by grafting it onto the tall-tale folk tradition." Others hark back to Tom Paine and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers, or even to the Elizabethan era, when, thanks to Gutenberg, a generation of English writers became intoxicated with language...
Newspapers -- remember them? They're where people used to get their infotainment before CNN, Hard Copy and the Letterman Top 10 list. Kids don't read them much anymore; newspapers are nostalgia items for the geriatric Gutenberg generation. And even more anachronistic are newspaper movies, which were nearly always about rapacious reporters chiseling bereaved losers out of their private dignity. Five Star Final, The Front Page (His Girl Friday in the Cary Grant edition) and Ace in the Hole were papers in nutshell, tabloid on celluloid. They gave you the headlines, the editorial and the funnies too. The subject...
...That Gutenberg contraption has done nothing but cause eyestrain. Why not banish all these from Lamont entirely-and rechristen it: Luddite Library...