Word: xeroxes
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News Service for instance, a petroleum industry newsletter that costs $435 a year, is available for pennies a copy to anyone with a Xerox machine and a borrowed original. After years of controversy, the Senate last week passed a revision of the copyright law that would prohibit photocopying of more than a small excerpt from copyrighted material. The bill is now bogged down in the House. Says Marshall McLuhan: "Whereas Caxton and Gutenberg enabled all men to become readers, Xerox has enabled all men to become publishers...
...second set of tablets to replace the ones he had broken. Medieval monks gladly spent lifetimes copying manuscripts by hand. Photography, that most exact of reproductive processes, has since its invention in the last century been elevated to a high art. But unlike most illuminated manuscripts and some photographs, Xerox copies are seldom more interesting than their originals. The Xerox machine has taken the art out of copying, made it too easy. As a result, people are copying more now and enjoying it less. Nothing nowadays seems too trivial to be immortalized by that moving light-bar, memos of momentary...
Copiers are churning out boxcars of raw, unsummarized information, but is anybody out there reading it? In a study, one Boston company wrote, "Did you really read this?" on all Xerox copies produced at the firm, and requested that they be returned with an answer. More than half came back marked "no." Even the people who make copies no longer find it necessary always to read them first. Watergate Defendant Kenneth Parkinson successfully argued that he had hot read a particular incriminating document; he had merely Xeroxed it. The photocopier has made many Americans too lazy to copy documents...
...Even the Xerox machine's contributions to investigative journalism are ambiguous. The copier may have helped disgruntled leakers illuminate a few dark Government and corporate secrets, but it has also spurred bureaucrats to even greater taciturnity. After all, what malefactor in his right mind would put anything incriminating-or even refreshingly outspoken-on paper nowadays? In addition, the copier's ability to turn confidential communications into bestsellers has encouraged memo drafters everywhere to strive for blandness. Says Professor Anthony Athos of the Harvard Business School: "When the writer knows that through the magic of Xerox many people will...
...Xerox machines have probably become too ubiquitous for Americans to kick the habit entirely, but there are some measures that could discourage excess. Copier manufacturers could end their current race to build ever faster and more convenient machines, which only encourage overuse. Heavy institutional users of copiers could also replace their hares with tortoises; slower machines are generally cheaper to operate any way. To conserve paper - and trees - manufacturers could provide more recycled paper for their machines. And, of course, a little personal self-control would help; copying a marginally impor tant document does not diminish its superfluity...