I’m doing “integrated” instruction for a freshman Comm class and had an interesting discussion on Wikipedia in college-level research. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Why is Wikipedia not the best source to use for your speeches? Where does it fail in our evaluation criteria?
Student 1: Well, encyclopedias aren’t necessarily the best for this type of research.
Me: Excellent point.
Student 2: You don’t know who wrote any of the articles.
Me: And for research, you should know some of their bona fides, right? Ethos and all.
Student 3: Aw, c’mon man, you know who wrote it. The Wikipedia Dude wrote it!!
Me: Alright then, who’s the Wikipedia Dude?
Student 3: I don’t know, but it’s Wikipedia, it’s got EVERYTHING!
Me: Well how do you know how useful it is if you don’t know who wrote it.
Student 3: Jesus and Buddha wrote Wikipedia.
Thank you Jesus and Buddha for Students 1 and 2, otherwise I’m pretty sure I’d be obligated to hang myself from the highest rafters of the gym.
If you work in a large urban public library, you can learn about various psychoses among people. And how drug and alcohol abuse can make people miserable. And help people find porn.
When was the last time you unscrolled a good book, or felt the solemn heft of a clay tablet that contains the laws of the land? Surely, if you have done neither of those things you must be completely innocent of the joys of a written language.
Or does technology advance eventually and leave older methods of doing things in the dust (quite literally, in the case of paper)?
Written language will not die off. I do disagree with him there. But books will.
Derleth—any sign of that happening? The evidence I would accept is sustained decline in publication figures. How many books were published last year compared with 5 or 10 years previously? Or waves of Barnes & Noble or Borders closings, bookseller stock values dropping, etc.
'Cause if E-text was going to wipe out the codex, it would have begun by now. We 21st-centuryites live a seriously computerized existence. Computers are in all our schools. Computers are in all our libraries. Computers are in all our offices. Computers are in all our homes. All I do all day long is computer, computer, computer. Ironically, one of my favorite activities with the computer is online ordering of printed paper codex books. I just bought a new bookcase because the 7 I had were stacked to the ceiling and can’t be crammed any fuller without bursting. (If you’re thinking to yourself “Only seven bookcases? Small time!”, I have extra large bookcases built into my house by a carpenter, each of them twice the volume of an average one.) Even more ironically, I don’t have time to read all these new books because I spend too much time online, mostly this really cool site called Straight Dope Message Boards that you should know about.
But I keep buying the new books. Often I’m glad I did, because then I can look up information to post at the SDMB in answer to people’s questions… printed information that is not accessible on the internet. Then Dopers go “Well done, Johanna!” and the thanks goes to the humble, low-tech paper codex.
I think it’s possible but highly unlikely. Paper is still cheap, portable, and very much multi-culturally entrenched (see ryobserver’s comment above). Sure, e-paper looks like it might have some promise, but I’m skeptical.