Keeping the mind on the paper (Blog Post #3)

The other day, as I sat in my textual analysis class, I was informed; that we were going to be having a lecture and we will have to take some notes. There were some groans but as I took out my 500 sheet spiral binder I glanced up and noticed two people sitting on both sides of me took out their “notebooks.” By notebooks I mean Dell Inspiron rather than Five Star. I must have felt like the kid in Athens who took out his slate and turned to see his class mates with their brand new papyrus.

Both papyrus and the computer have shaped our societies but some fear that with the computer being the new papyrus that it is hurting us academically rather than moving us forward. While the computer is a useful tool, it might have been a good idea for it to remain secondary rather than the primary tool.

But before the dissection of the computer and it’s wearing and tearing on society, let’s look at how paper turned us onto what Susan Jacoby termed “The Dumbing of America.”

When clay and stone were found to be to hard to handle and write with so Egypt brought in papyrus and eventually imported to Greece where the alphabet was taking off. This is almost the same exact formula but just substitute the variables for clay and papyrus with paper and the computer and viola, the solution is a movement as great as the recording of the alphabet.

Just like the laptop the paper was portable and easier to carry around, but unlike the computer it caused classes, which structured society and educated leaders. It made the spoken word concrete as well and allowed for more accurate information, because at the time one had to be very fast to write on the clay that dried so quickly. This also led to the invention of the book (skipping leaps and bounds in production here). The invention also showed the test of time as today our museums are populated with scrolls, books and documents marking important parts of history, they can never be reworded from their original.

With years and years of paper influencing culture, religion, the world we have moved onto something that unlike papyrus and paper can be manipulated, forged, and reproduced infinitely. The computer can be a tool of deception. A letter that is sent cannot be recalled unless someone knows somebody to get it back. E-mail has the capability to recall those angry letters or those unclear paragraphs (we’ll get to that in a moment).

Which brings what is happening with the post office; to the forefront. In recent years the U.S. postal service has seen a decline in mail because of all the free services that allows anybody to not only have one e-mail address but multiple.

The multiplicity of e-mail addresses has led to a lot of identity theft and scams. I remember reading a while back that a scammer can have address not only linked to several accounts around the world but can pose as an entirely different person. But of course it’s not just the e-mail that feels the effect of abusers, it is the newest craze in web surfing: social networking sites. Countless of my MySpace friends have fallen victim to the hackers who use their space to promote erectile dysfunction medication or an ad for a type of marijuana that is “untraceable.”

There aren’t a lot of place where one can go and not see a credit card machine. Money has taken on a digital form and like aides memoires can be confusing at times. In future eras when we become the ancestors and they look back will our data from banks and Excel spreadsheets be just like the stick with notches?

Paper is sometimes looked down on in school settings. Paper is good for taking notes and that is about it. Most teachers will agree that reports should be turned in typed up. Also, papers and articles have it more easy in the fact that words have the option of spell check to avoid embarrassing mistakes. But since society relies on it and treats it as an extension it has also caused problems. Some times Microsoft Word will auto-replace a word, it will not show up as a misspelled word, which is why editors still exist today. Even this blog is a school assignment and shows an image of a paperless world.

Even though a computer printout maybe preferred, it doesn’t stop bad writing. To write one has to read to see how it should be done. The language that is being used on the social computer world is showing up in class rooms. Students are also not reading enough because of the quick snippets that they can get right across their desktop. Susan Jacoby reports that “The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004.”

To be more specific, the computer itself is not responsible for the decline of the print news paper but rather a small program called the Internet. Just recently Baltimore City’s own Examiner just shut its doors. Many other small newspapers are following suite. Even newspaper giants like the Baltimore Sun are having layoffs and shutting offices. Since news is not just on sites like Baltimore Sun.com but rather Facebook and MySpace which aren’t really news sources at all but cater to their users so they can use the network sites for all their needs. It blurs the line between jobs and doesn’t create structures in society but rather bleeds them all together.

If one had to make a prediction then in a couple years (reminiscent of slate and clay) paper will most likely be non existent. Some would say “good, it would cut down on pollution.” Um, that would be where they would be wrong. Computer and communication companies have a dirty little secret. A lot of their technological waste is more hazardous then spilling a couple of dump trucks full of note book paper and books into the ocean. The computer and cell phone parts are shipped to villages in China and other areas that reuse the parts but there really isn’t a factory it is medieval in at best. Cancer and other mutations run rampant in these villages.

While companies waste more and more paper everyday and campaigns to go green and be paperless are the fad, the days of papyrus and paper might not have been that bad.