No. 1: In the Beginning
by Ben Hammersley
It is, perhaps, not the best way to launch a column. Driving your
readers to jealous rage is generally considered bad form. But I have to
be honest: I'm writing this in a cafe in Florence, Italy, sitting in the
summer Tuscan sun, and trying not to knock the wine glass over.
Good for me, you might spit, but there is a point to mentioning this.
This cafe is in the Piazza San Lorenzo, placing me outside the
Laurentian Library. On the other side of that locked door sit some of
the most important books in Western civilisation. Not just the most
important titles, but the most important individual copies
themselves.
There are the very copies of Plato's Dialogues that were rescued, and
translated feet from where I type, which kicked off the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the modern age; fifteen-hundred-year-old copies of Virgil; handwritten manuscripts by Petrarch in which he
invented the sonnet; shelves of priceless works on philosophy that had
such influence on modern thinking that their ideas now seem more like
common sense than things once debated and argued over.
But argued over they were. The story of the Renaissance up to the age that has given us the internet and space travel and all the
wonders of modernity is a story of argument, debate and huge
intellectual discord. With libraries and manuscripts, and the publishing of
books, came the spreading of ideas. The more books people read, the more
ideas they would receive. They more ideas they had, the more they would
argue. The more they argued, and pushed, and stretched their world to
fit, the more progress we made: the world that allows me to write this
in Italy and send it instantly over the internet to Portland is directly
traceable to the world started in the Laurentian Library and its
counterparts around the world. Books mattered.
This isn't changing. For our generation, just explaining what we do for
a living is something of a struggle. Things move fast. We're all working
within concepts layered upon ideas, placed upon paradigms, based upon
technologies that weren't even dreamt of a decade or two ago. It's not
getting any simpler.
As the internet, and its effect on our lives, becomes ever more complex, so does
the information we need to understand it. And the
paradox of the age is that although we've built the greatest system for
the sharing of information in the history of mankind, to really
understand it we need to resort to the oldest technology. The future is
silicon, but its heart is made of paper. In this new
renaissance, books matter more than ever.
Over the next months, I'll be using this column to explore the way we
understand the technology we're building — how we use the knowledge
found in the books talked about elsewhere in this newsletter. I'll be
looking at the key ideas behind the technology we work with every day
and talking to the people who are working to understand them. I hope
you'll join me.
Geek extraordinaire, open source icon, and Guardian correspondent Ben Hammersley will entertain Technica readers each month with various musings from the world of science and technology. Click here to visit his website. |
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