Paper - Paging through History

 Everytime I read a non-fiction book that I like, I make a few notes. I decided to start publishing them here so that the zero followers I have could also appreciate them.

The following excerpt is taken from 'Paper -Paging through History by Mark Kurlansky'.

Studying the history of paper exposes a number of historical misconceptions, the most important of which is this technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society. It is exactly the reverse. Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it. To use a simple example, in China in 250 BCE, Meng Tian invented a paintbrush made from camel hair. His invention did not suddenly inspire the Chinese people to start writing and painting, or to develop calligraphy. Rather, Chinese society had already established a system of writing but had a growing urge for more written documents and more elaborate calligraphy. Their previous tool—a stick dipped in ink—could not meet the rising demand. Meng Tian found a device that made both writing and calligraphy faster and of a far higher quality.

Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible.

None of these statements is true. These developments came about because society had come to a point where they were needed. This is true of all technology, but in the case of paper, it is particularly clear.

The Europeans initially had no use for paper until more than a thousand years after the Chinese invented it. It was not that they had only just discovered the existence of paper, however. The Arabs had been trying to sell it to them for years. But it was not until they began learning the Arab ways of mathematics and science, and started expanding literacy, that parchment made from animal hides—their previous writing material—became too slow and expensive to make in the face of their fast-growing needs.

There are other important lessons to be learned from the history of technology—and other commonly held fallacies. One is that new technology eliminates old. This rarely happens. Papyrus survived for centuries in the Mediterranean world after paper was introduced. Parchment remains in use. The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted. Electronic calculators have not even ended the use of the abacus, and more than a century after Thomas Edison was awarded a patent for a commercially successful lightbulb in 1879, there are still four hundred candle manufacturers in the United States alone, employing some 7,000 workers with annual sales of more than $2 billion.

New technology, rather than eliminating older technology, increases choices. Computers will no doubt change the role of paper, but it is extremely unlikely that paper will be eliminated.

The history of technology also shows that Luddites always lose. The original Luddites were artisanal workers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain who protested the loss of their skilled jobs to machines operated by low-wage, unskilled workers. Originally, the movement was active in a wide range of fields, including printing, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was largely focused on the textile industry. It is uncertain why its proponents were called Luddites, but there was a mythical anti-machine rebel of the eighteenth century named Lud who, like Robin Hood, was said to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites opposed such technology as power looms, and they attacked mills, smashed machinery, and fought against the British .

it is futile to denounce technology itself. Rather, you have to try to change the operation of the society for which the technology was created. For every new technology, there are detractors, those who see the new invention as destroying all that is good in the old. This happened when the written word started to replace the oral word, when paper began replacing parchment, when printing started to take work away from scribes—and it is still happening today, with electronics threatening paper. In all these cases, the arguments against the new technology were similar: the functioning of the human brain was imperiled, we would lose the power of our memories, human contact would be diminished, and the warmth of human engagement would be lost.

These early outcries against technology went largely unheeded, much the same way warnings about computers are going unheeded today. It is true that the greater the aids to memory, the less we depend on our brain. But that does not mean that our minds are being destroyed. Illiterate people have better memories than literate people. But few would see that as an argument in favor of illiteracy. The introduction of the written word demonstrated that such aids, though they make us more dependent, also make us more powerful.

You cannot warn about what a new technology will do to a society because that society has already made the shift. That was Marx’s point about the Luddites. Technology is only a facilitator. Society changes, and that change creates new needs. That is why the technology is brought in. The only way to stop the technology would be to reverse the changes in the society. Printing did not create the Protestant Reformation; the ideas and the will to spread them is what created printing presses.