“The Information Revolution”

The article “Future Reading” by Anthony Grafton supports different main ideas about the new digital era in the twenty-first century towards how one receives information and what could be the future of the traditional books.

The article discusses Google’s ambitious projects such Google Book Search, which has the aim to “built a comprehensive index of all the books in the world” and Google Library, which has the aim to digitalize the most books in the world as possible. However, comes in question of how much information a database can hold? How accurate the research on a search engine can be? How good the pages are scanned? What about the books that are cover by copyrights? What about documentation and books which are nfitable for the companies to digitalize? Also, there is too much documentation and books to be digitalized that are might not be possible to be available online anytime soon.

The article brings in question of what about the future of the traditional books. How magical is to go through individuals original pages of a book or document, and discover the smell of the time that that was written, or to whom it belonged? Also, it page of an original book was designed to fit each perspective of what is written. However, the new digitalized books and documents cannot provide all those sensations to the researcher or reader.

The article also criticizes that the digitization process in only being provided for the western books, leaving on the side the non-western books from the poorest societies. This means that those societies already have alack of information access for their own literature and history, due to limited access to printed books. So, they might have access to the western literature and history, but not their own. Therefore, they will still be in the dark in regard of information access during the digital era.

The article also argue about that some companies that are digitalizing some of the documents are interesting in only make profits other than historical information. Some information like books, articles and documents can be destroyed in the process. Like what happen when the microfilm was introduced in the Libraries and many books and newspapers that could be preserved were destroyed (Grafton).

However, the technological information process is a two blades sword. It has the negative aspects that I presented before, and also the positive aspects. Never before in any time in history has information traveled as fast and cheaper before. Nowadays, one can access any type of newspaper in the world trough the internet in just a second. The digitalization of information made possible researchers to reached books and documents that would be abroad or in hard access. Today, historians and researchers can study original documents and books without even going to the original place that hold it. As an example, The United States Declaration Independence is available to anyone in the world to read by the Library of Congress database.

A large amount of information became available to mainstream society, which did not have access before, after Guttenberg invented the printed system. It made possible to open the world’s mind to new cultures, religions and civilizations. At that time information became to travel faster and cheaper. Nowadays, the new technology of the internet and the large amount of database and information that it can holds, created an revolution towards information in an even bigger proportion that was never seen before in any time in history. It is a new modern revolution, the Information Revolution, which the end result and the final consequences one might can predicted, but one does not know for sure yet. Therefore, it might be that in the close future the “electronic library would be able to bring all the texts – past and present, multicultural – on a particular subject together, gaining a clear sense of what we as civilization, as a species do know or do not know” (Grafton). However, the end of the books and documents are not coming anytime soon

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