Fragments from the Library

"As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes - which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present - our perception of history will inevitably alter. .... we meet the past as much in the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all information is equally accessible." Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: