Sage Ross wrote:
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Chad wrote:
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
p.s. Personally, discussions of "offline" here and everywhere (say, accessibility of educational materials) are absurdly myopic. Consideration of offline use is about as relevant now as consideration of horse stables in urban planning 100 years ago
One would argue that putting in horse stables 100 years ago was a smart move, as people use horses. You can't know that someone's going to up and invent the car.
Furthermore, horse populations continued to grow well into the 20th century. Horses peaked in the US in the 1910s, and in Finland in the 1950s, and horse-drawn equipment was the core transportation technology of World War I and played a key role even in World War II.
I continue to admire my great-grandfather's prescience. He was a harness-maker in small-town Saskatchewan when in 1922 he was seen driving away from town forever on the day that his shop burned to the ground.
This is a typical pattern when a complex technology is introduced in the presence of a simpler one; it's not a simple matter of replacement, and old technologies (where the infrastructure is easy to maintain) can stick around and even become more significant, even while a complex technology spreads as well. (See David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.)
Results vary. Slide-rules were replaced by electronic calculators very quickly.
I'm speculating here, but it would not surprise me at all if amount of print publishing is still growing, and could continue to do so for a few more decades at least.
I agree that it is probably still growing, but I would not measure its prognosis in decades. That technology had a big boost in the 1830s when rag papers were replaced by the much cheaper wood-pulp papers. Now the rapidly declining costs of electronic storage are in conflict with increasing costs of paper production and shipping. When environmental factors are brought in the costs go up even more. Perhaps the tipping point is reached when the new technology becomes accessible and affordable to a high percentage of the world's population.
Ec