Scrolling Forward

"Like Henry Petroski's The Pencil, David M. Levy's Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and as we move into the digital age. We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds -- letters and credit-card receipts, business memos and books, television images and Web pages -- yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are being disturbed and transformed by new technologies and practices. Potentially unsettling questions arise: What is the future of the book? Is paper about to disappear? With the Internet, what will happen to libraries, copyright, education? What will become of literature and journalism? What does all this mean for me, my livelihood, my world? An expert on information and written forms, and a former researcher for the document pioneer Xerox, Levy masterfully navigates these concerns, offering reassurance while sharing his own excitement about many of the new kinds of documents that are emerging. He demonstrated how today's technologies, particularly the personal computer and the World Wide Web, are having analogous effects to past inventions, such as paper, the printing press, writing implements and typewriters, in shaping how we use documents and the forms those documents take. Placing documents in historical context -- for example, showing the evolution of the letter into the memo and finally into e-mail -- Scrolling Forward lets us see the continuity between the written forms of today and those of the past, while exploring their differences. More than this, in disclosing the way documents work as "talking things," bearers of culture, and invaluable aids in our fundamental human impulse to construct a world where order, knowledge, and community prevail, it raises questions of value that can serve to illuminate our way as we proceed in the digital world"--Dust jacket.