Old words
Great post from a working library on reading The Information by James Gleick:
Interestingly, often the meaning of the words changes more readily than new words invent themselves. Now, the word “message” refers to something ethereal, intangible. Soon enough, “book” may resemble not so much a bound object as a lengthy piece of writing (perhaps it does so already). Perhaps, in fact, you can follow the path of information’s disembodiment in that of another book: the dictionary.
Really interesting stuff and I agree that we will all come to think of and refer to ‘book’ in a totally different way. All this e-this and i-that is fine for now, but it will get old and start to make no sense. Our points of reference will change.
A computing example for you. The latest version of the Mac operating system, released by Apple last week, includes a feature called ‘Versions’. It constantly saves and backs up your work up for you. You don’t have to worry about losing it and you can revert back in time to any number of previous versions.
Now think about the icon that almost all applications still use to depict the ‘Save’ button. It’s a picture of a floppy disc. Remember those bad boys? Our notion of what it means to ‘Save’ is different now and it will continue to evolve. Those icons’ days are truly numbered.
All of which makes me think about ‘Writer’. To be a writer used to be something magical. It required unique talent that belonged to only a select few in society – authors, journalists and advertising guys.
Now we are all writers. We text, we blog, we tweet. We are constantly chronicling. We are all writers.
In the future (and right now, actually) ‘Novelist’ is not simply a person who writes long form fiction. They’re also marketeers, publicists, salespeople and app builders. Different beasts entirely.
The word itself will remain the same. It’s our perception – what the word conjures up in our minds – that will change.
