"Future Reading" by Grafton

This author made some very good points about information history as well as the problems of digitization. First, it was very interesting to read about the ancient scribes and how for the very first time they used alphabetization as an organizing tool. Describing that moment in history sent chills down my spine. I wonder if those scribes knew what they were doing, or whether their mind was solely focused on creating more copies of business transactions. Did they every write in their spare time? Even though their job would not have included any self-conscious critical thinking or creative activities, I wonder whether, when they got home, they ever used their priceless skills to write about their life or write something that mattered to them alone, and not their job. But another point that this article did well was express the problems of copyright and the problems of what gets put online through different projects. He was completely right, wasn’t he, that the Google book project might indeed be changing the people access their information, but it is a very specific kind of information for now. What about the copyrighted material, what about material that has nothing to do with America or the Western tradition in general? Perhaps inclusion of non-Western kinds of historical artifacts like ancient scrolls will have to wait until China completely transitions into a democratically-based government, not one whose economy is the only thing that is less and less controlled by the government. Perhaps if China has this kind of project they will finally be able to show the world the remarkable and singular history and contributions that ancient and modern Chinese have made. So for them as for the West, Google Project could actually be much more about affirming a society’s history to the world, rather than just about intellectual pursuit.