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The all-seeing eye

November 03, 2005

An addendum to that last post: Google Print doesn't just raise complicated issues regarding ownership, compensation and copyright. It also provokes tricky questions about how content and form will be influenced over the longer run. At what point does a writer stop writing for the reader and start writing for the scanner?

Advertisement: Now available: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Order now from Amazon.

Comments

New media always invite new styles of communicating. At what point did scribes stop writing on clay and start writing for papyrus? All writing is done for a reader, regardless of the method of transmission. Most web content now is repurposed from other formats and hardly changed in the process. The point about Google's project is that they want to index what's there, not create new content. If it leads to new content, fine, but television didn't kill radio, movies didn't kill theatre and Google won't kill writing.

Posted by: Mark Harris at November 3, 2005 01:57 PM

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