From Blackboard to Book and Beyond

D.F. McKenzie. in text first published in 1984 and collected in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts proposes:


Only as its memory systems have grown has the computer changed its nature from blackboard to book. It has at long last become literate and qualified to join other textual systems. In time, I suppose, as it now learns to speak, it will constitute an oral archive as well.


Note how this evolution is not expressed in the idiom of reversal fondly cultivated by McLuhanesque formulations.

And so for day 393
10.01.2008