Remember<\/b><\/p>\n
In his 2009 book <\/span>What is an Apparatus? <\/span><\/i>Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterized his titular inquiry as \u201cliterally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.\u201d (<\/span>1)\u00a0<\/span>He goes on to explain that beyond institutions (such as schools, factories and prisons), apparatuses can also include, \u201cthe pen, writing, literature, philosophy…computers, cellular telephones, and…language itself.\u201d (<\/span>2)\u00a0<\/span>In this symbiotic realm of object and subject, Agamben implies a fundamental, if enigmatic relationship between people and the materials that shape us, as we shape them. Author Vik- tor Mayer-Schoenberger mines the mnemonic niches of this provocative notion further, tracing a history through what he calls \u201cexternal memories\u201d crucial to the development of human knowledge, and <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>humans know. From prehistoric cave paintings and ancient scrolls, all the way to the diary of his stepfather, Mayer-Schoenberger finds a thread less in specific content, and more in how \u201c[my relative] externalized what was important to him, so he would have the cues he needed to remember something later.\u201d (<\/span>3)<\/span><\/p>\n In 1945, in search of the next evolutionary stage of memory, American engineer Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) imagined a mechanical library (called the \u201cmemex\u201d) that would revolutionize acts of remembering by quickly and efficiently storing information without pen or paper. Seeking to better the subject by making it one with the object, he touted, \u201c[The memex] is an enlarged intimate supplement to [man\u2019s] memory.\u201d (<\/span>4)\u00a0<\/span>From prosthetic to co-presence, American psychologist J.J. Gibson (1904-1979) theorized this acceleration of the apparatus to a place where an object or environment \u2013 according to its inherent properties \u2013 dictates how it can be used. (<\/span>5)\u00a0<\/span>When applying this model to paper (as authors Abigail J. Sellen and Richard Harper do in their 2001 book <\/span>The Myth of the Paperless Office<\/span><\/i>), Gibson\u2019s theory of \u201caffordances\u201d describes a thin, light, opaque and flexible material affording tactile, quintessentially human actions of grasping, carrying, folding, recording and writing. Xu Bing\u2019s essay in this catalog traces a piece of the long, interwoven history of man and paper that followed, where the material created to record memory implicitly embodies its place, maker, and the maker of all things. In a recent feature in <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i>, contemporary paper maker Timothy Barrett recalls the anthropomorphic connection of finding an imprint of a person\u2019s thumb in a renaissance-era\u00a0<\/span>tome, adding, \u201cThe fingerprint marked the sheet with the humanity of the person who made it. I could feel his presence.\u201d (<\/span>6)<\/span><\/p>\n Yet as the interface between mankind and the book continues to move through time, the centuries-old relationship between man, material and memory is redrawn in, and by the digital era. At this intersection of text and technology, David L. Small surveys a wave of mutations (in his doctoral thesis <\/span>Rethinking the Book<\/span><\/i>) as the exponential growth of electronic information spawns a hybrid apparatus in Agamben\u2019s catalog. (<\/span>7)\u00a0<\/span>This essay will consider the reciprocal affect of paper\u2019s evolution upon its maker, tracing the trajectories of book, page and print as a reflection of man\u2019s ambivalent relationship with the media of memory. In a time where the conjoined life of paper and person faces a sublime frontier in the digital unknown, famously iconoclastic artist and author Doug Coupland locates an unsettling, but ultimately necessary paradigm shift at the precipice of human fate. Issuing an ultimatum with apocalyptic flair, he declares \u201cBooks are central to the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. At least for now… One way or another, books will cease to exist. They\u2019ll either be supplanted or humanity will become extinct.\u201d (<\/span>8)<\/span><\/p>\n To this point in the evolutionary trek of mankind across the millennia, the aforementioned Timothy Barrett heralds paper \u201cas the elemental stuff of civilization.\u201d (<\/span>9)\u00a0<\/span>His epic claim is reinforced by Dr. Dorothea Eimert, who earnestly asks \u2013 in the foreword to Therese Weber\u2019s 2007 book <\/span>The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years <\/span><\/i>\u2013 \u201cCould our civilization and the science of today exist without paper?\u201d (<\/span>10)\u00a0<\/span>Yet in the past two decades, paper\u2019s lengthy reign as the repository (some may say architect) of cultural memory is being usurped by swift technological change and the worldwide growth of smart devices. (<\/span>11)\u00a0<\/span>And while many may view this challenge to paper\u2019s empire as a more recent phenomenon, such an overthrow has arguably been in the works since the 1800s. During this time, a seemingly endless number of starry-eyed inventors and enterprising companies have introduced new technologies to replace, \u201cthe old, paper-based ways of doing things.\u201d (<\/span>12)\u00a0<\/span>From phonographs, telephones and radio to television, email and texting, paper \u2013 as the default avatar of old-fashioned practices and technology \u2013 has become a dead man walking; something to be bettered, improved, and surpassed as the word \u201cpaperless\u201d has become synonymous with progress.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet while we think of \u201cnew media\u201d as \u201cmass media,\u201d and the book as a stalwart of indi- vidual experience (isolating and affirming the Western notion of self), Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) reminds us that said book was the <\/span>first <\/span><\/i>vessel of mass communication. (<\/span>13)\u00a0<\/span>He dedicated much of his life to mapping the evolving social dynamics between media, message and memory, highlighting \u2013 as a case study \u2013 the way the printing press changed not only the quantity of pages, but the character and relationship between author and authored. Before that, before the epoch-setting invention of Johannes Gutenberg, paper was the technological bellwether of its time \u2013 relegating more \u201cprimitive\u201d writing surfaces (such as stone, wood blocks, clay tablets and sheets of laminated bark) to antiquity. The lessons that previous generations had learned solely by listening, watching and doing were subsequently squeezed into words and documents, materializing memory while narrowing the heterogeneity of oral traditions. (<\/span>14)\u00a0<\/span>Far from universal embrace, there was corresponding lament and anxiety in some corners \u2013 with 19<\/span>th <\/span>century British conservatives going so far as to denounce \u201cmass\u201d reading the way contemporary pundits condemn television and the Internet. Speaking to the colonial nature of media (in words eerily apropos to paper\u2019s current status vis-a?-vis digital technology), McLuhan argued, \u201cA new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.\u201d (<\/span>15)\u00a0<\/span>In this light, paper\u2019s role as a refugee of the information age may contain emancipatory potential. Rather than fighting against obsolescence, irreverent German theorist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that being irrelevant (or \u201cuntimely\u201d) was in fact, the most contemporary state \u2013 in that it allowed one a greater perspective of time and context. (<\/span>16)\u00a0<\/span>Inside its outsider role, the book can thus be an oracle as the page becomes a portal; their \u201cauras\u201d (with credit to Walter Benjamin) regressing from democratic dissemination to revered reliquaries.<\/span><\/p>\n As the norm now goes, the more ubiquitous objects (such as books, records, photo albums and cash) are replaced by digital\/virtual \u201cupgrades,\u201d the more their original forms become the stuff of fetish. Just as the dematerialization of the art object (popularized by Marcel Duchamp and \u201cnamed\u201d by Lucy Lippard) led to a gradual resurgence in the art \/ act of making, the popularity of e-readers has produced a counter-fascination with the collection, display, and \u201cobject-ness\u201d of books. (<\/span>17)\u00a0<\/span>From embellishing coffee tables to being lit aflame by political opponents, Harvard English professor Leah Price gives voice to a swirling vein of ontological (arguably Greenbergian) formalism when stating, \u201cI\u2019m interested not just in words \u2013 the verbal structure of a book \u2013 but also in the material object.\u201d (<\/span>18)\u00a0<\/span>Shifting the focus from what they <\/span>say <\/span><\/i>(informational utility) to what they <\/span>are <\/span><\/i>(physical utility), Price has lived the paradigm shift between the historical \u201cvulgarity\u201d of treating a book as a bare object, to a place where, in her words, \u201cIt is legitimate to use a book as a paperweight, [or] to use an encyclopedia as a doorstop.\u201d (<\/span>19)\u00a0<\/span>In the hands of modern-day designers and decorators, this materialist re-purposing takes on new flair as the architectonic properties of books turn them into plinths, pillars and risers for antique furniture, while their symbolic capital (as signifiers of knowledge and sophistication) turn them into status-driven ornaments. Like messiahs for the pariah, a recent <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/i>report credited French \u201cNew Designer\u201d Philippe Starck as one of a growing number of said innovators to \u201cgive books a stay of execution\u201d by using them as decor. (<\/span>20)\u00a0<\/span>In a similar gesture of paradoxical salvation, some publishers are keeping print alive to fend off the economic losses of e-book file sharing \u2013 containing the flow of information in a vessel once used to spread the word. (<\/span>21)\u00a0<\/span>Prognosticating on the fate of an object thus being pushed outside its function, Bob Stein \u2013 the Founder of \u201cThe Institute for the Future of the Book\u201d \u2013 envisions his ward becoming a rarified luxury item for those that prefer deluxe packaging. In this uncanny context, as content slips into a state of being inconsequential, one must wonder what, and how the page will speak?<\/span><\/p>\n Beyond a heightened value <\/span>as <\/span><\/i>object, paper has now become an instrument for bestowing value upon that which it carries \u2013 like prime real estate for the life of words. In so doing, a hierarchy of information is instituted akin to that McLuhan observed in 1960: where books embodied the highest echelons of knowledge, and tele-media were incidental aids. Decades later, in response to Coupland\u2019s previously cited ultimatum (and the perceived glut of raw information on the Net), blogger Scott Anderson gives credence to a growing print\/digital class system when stating, \u201cAs much as I love the feel of paper, the vast majority of information transmitted from the printed page doesn\u2019t need to come from a printed page.\u201d Whereas a digital text can live forever in accuracy and integrity \u2013 endlessly reproducible and beyond the grasp of analog vulnerabilities (i.e. age, light) \u2013 its sheer ubiquity infuses this information with the air of disposability. In his 2011 book <\/span>Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age<\/span><\/i>, the aforementioned Mayer-Schonberger demonstrates how such data can be simultaneously infinite and inferior: arguing that \u2013 in contrast to earlier eras where it was more prudent to shed space-hungry files \u2013 it is that much easier \u201cto keep everything\u201d when the files are immaterial. Eschewing editors, selection and Darwinism in the process, this derogation of the digital obscures the fact that \u2013 according to researchers Ronald E. Rice and Sara Schneider \u2013 most paper documents are misfiled, lost, or obsolete before they could even be considered valuable. (<\/span>22)\u00a0<\/span>Yet the very fact that such information is considered \u201cimportant\u201d enough to be printed on paper speaks to a romantic resurrection of the values with which we once processed such information. From sustained attention and linear thinking to an admirably non-instrumental approach to words in print, the implicit content of these pages are the ideals that, ac- cording to Professor Price, we want to <\/span>believe <\/span><\/i>we have.<\/span><\/p>\n Elaborating on this crucial point, Price emphasizes, \u201cIn thinking about new media, we measure what we do now against a nostalgic baseline. We compare the way we really do use digital media to the way we imagine we once used printed media.\u201d (<\/span>23)\u00a0<\/span>Taking this one step further, it can be argued that by systematically printing emails and photos, building files until they bulge, and littering our desks with sheets of all sorts, it\u2019s as much about <\/span>what <\/span><\/i>we want to remember, as <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>we want to remember remembering. Like a pseudo-mnemonic device of apperception and sublimation, this printing of digitized information tries to reunite the page with the ways we hope we once processed their con- tents. Renowned techno-sociologist author Steven A. Johnson injects a particularly revealing foil into this conversation when speaking about the inability to skim an e-book as easily (or as satisfyingly) as a paper book. Challenging our supposedly dedicated path through the tomes of old, he explains, \u201cThe digital age is supposed to be all about attention deficit disorder and hypertextual distractions, but e-books lock you into reading them in a linear fashion more than print books do.\u201d (<\/span>24)\u00a0<\/span>In this more objective mirror, in the stark, unforgiving stare of perfect digital memory, the mythology of our relationship to paper can be seen leading us to mis-remember; to hallucinate halcyon days of pure thought that \u2013 depending on your perspective \u2013 push us to demand more from digital sources, or chase a Lacanian ideal that never was.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet there is something so very tangible, so gratifying, of feeling the physical weight of one\u2019s progress through information move from the right to the left hand. (<\/span>25)\u00a0<\/span>From hallowed scrolls to softcover paperbacks, the motor memory of collecting one\u2019s cognitive conquests is as intoxicating as it can be obfuscating. How much do we truly recall, and how much of that is actual content, versus the process of attaining that content?<\/span><\/p>\n In a recent study of knowledge worker practices across a spectrum of esteemed fields (law, finance, advertising, design), Alison Kidd found that paper documents were rarely filed or referenced after being generated. Instead, in a manner reinforcing Mayer-Schonberger\u2019s aforementioned thesis of external memories, it was the <\/span>process <\/span><\/i>of taking these notes that helped said workers to construct and organize their thoughts. (<\/span>26)\u00a0<\/span>Sellen and Harper had similar findings in their study of Information Technology workers, highlighting their printing of emails \u201cto read [the information] and make sense of it,\u201d and reminder memos that \u2013 according to their perceived importance \u2013 were reiterated into smaller pieces of paper then posted on a bulletin board or computer monitor. (<\/span>27)\u00a0<\/span>In both studies, digitally generated information was manifested (and arranged) in the offices of these workers as temporary, but tangible constellations of documents meant to stoke, maintain and organize memory. Reading the ensuing desk piles as cartographies of a desired relationship between information and cognition, Kidd adds, \u201cThis [ostensible] clutter provides important clues to remind [these workers] of where they were in their space of ideas.\u201d (<\/span>28)\u00a0<\/span>Sellen and Harper are even more direct in their assessment, stating, \u201cWithout these bits of paper ready at hand, it is as if the writing, and more especially the <\/span>thinking<\/span><\/i>, could not take place in earnest.\u201d (<\/span>29)<\/span><\/p>\n In an even more formative intersection between material and memory, similar aspirations in, and of paper characterize the relationship between college students and textbooks. A recent survey by the Book Industry Study Group found that nearly 75% of U.S. college students preferred physical texts over their digital equivalent. The University of Toronto Bookstore sees much the same attitude amongst their constituency, with Director of IT Services Peter Clinton observing that said students, \u201cdespite having grown up in the Internet era, still largely prefer to read from the printed page.\u201d (<\/span>30)\u00a0<\/span>And while Clinton emphasizes that \u201cwe\u2019re at a tipping point\u201d when it comes to full-scale conversion from paper to digital publishing, a long-heralded parallel shift in the business world has failed to fully materialize. Sellen and Harper confirm that while \u201cThe future of the electronic office seemed assured, [and] the hegemony of paper doomed,\u201d that in actuality, \u201cthe promised \u2018paperless office\u2019 is as much a mythical ideal today as it was thirty years ago.\u201d (<\/span>31)\u00a0<\/span>Their research goes on to reveal that the World Wide Web has increased the amount of printing done at both home and office, the same way \u201cthe use of email in an organization causes an average of 40% increase in paper consumption.\u201d (<\/span>32)\u00a0<\/span>Across Europe, North America and other parts of the world, paper consumption is thus climbing as office workers continue to choose it as their preferred medium for reading, reviewing, delivery, planning, and organizing files. In so doing, paper\u2019s Platonic properties (i.e. thoughtful processing and seeding memory) are just as present here as they were in previous examples, with an added dimension of social currency. That is to say, many of these workers allocated special importance to the hand delivery of these documents to \u201chumanize and personalize these processes.\u201d (<\/span>33)\u00a0<\/span>Reflecting the people in\/of paper\u2019s surrogate status within a dauntingly \u201cpaperless\u201d world, Sellen and Harper echo Coupland\u2019s forecast when adding, \u201c[the material\u2019s] physical presence on someone\u2019s desk drew attention to itself and served as a continual reminder to the recipient that action needed to be taken.\u201d (<\/span>34)<\/span><\/p>\n As paper lingers precariously on our collective, cultural desk \u2013 moving in and out of time as digital information colonizes almost every facet of being \u2013 just what action will take place remains to be seen. In Mike Huster\u2019s 2011 story for <\/span>MPS Insights<\/span><\/i>, \u201cPaper is dead or long live paper?\u201d he coolly reports, \u201cEventually, as has been declared, print <\/span>as we know it<\/span><\/i>, is dead\u201d (my italics). (<\/span>35)\u00a0<\/span>In so doing, he reiterates a widespread belief shared by many around the world, while also opening the provocative notion of metamorphosis. Behind all the anxiety, elegies and hand-wringing, the key point in this increasingly deafening dirge is that while the material (body) \u2013 <\/span>print as we know it <\/span><\/i>\u2013 may wither and perish, the praxis (spirit) can transmute itself, its surrounding media, and the people employing this evolving apparatus. The sentimental nostalgia that paper afforded, allowing us to romanticize the way we were (and fear the way we could be), is giving way to precise data streams that demand address, and a more realistic rear view mirror. And yet, at the same time, the ethos of paper is softening the exacting stare of technology\u2019s infallible memory \u2013 burnishing the edges and blurring the recall to create a more conducive, <\/span>human <\/span><\/i>space for us to \u201cprogress.\u201d (<\/span>36)<\/span><\/p>\n The enduring presence of paper \u201cartifacts\u201d upon office desks and college bookshelves speaks as much to wistfulness and habit, as it does to the anxiety that technology brings in a mechanized world. In a 1995 study of the social (\u201cshadow\u201d) costs brought about by the advent of e-systems, author and researcher Carole Groleau found that after computerization, many office workers continued to use paper files that the new systems were supposed to replace. (<\/span>37)\u00a0<\/span>Rice & Schneider reinforce this finding in their research, recog- nizing the umbilical nature of paper within the digital frontier when observing, \u201cThe old forms were desktop artifacts serving as symbolic interfaces for the individual between two system regimes, providing a sense of continuity and security during a time of uncertainty.\u201d (<\/span>38)\u00a0<\/span>McLuhan reminds us that similar unrest was felt when books unseated oral instruction\u2019s perch atop the information pyramid, and that such upheaval is as much predicament as opportunity. Foreseeing the unsettling, but necessary winds of change that technology would bring to the world of print, he wrote, \u201cThis challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we\u2019re confused, baffled.\u201d (<\/span>39)\u00a0<\/span>Cracks consequently fractured the imprint (implicit and explicit) of the page upon us, its population, propelling people to migrate with the spirit, if not the substance of paper. Decades later, awash in the waves of digital revolution and paper boats of ersatz intellectualism, Price echoes McLuhan\u2019s charge when urging us to not \u201cmake the history of the book a stick with which to beat digital media.\u201d (<\/span>40)<\/span><\/p>\n Akin to tea leaves in occult divination, it\u2019s helpful to look once again at the typical office desk for direction in the dialectical trek towards synthesis. With the desktop computer as the nucleus of today\u2018s work station, Rice & Schneider note how the importance of sur- rounding paper artifacts are often \u201cranked\u201d by their user (sometimes subconsciously), according to their proximity to the central beacon. In turn, core operating systems of the computing industry (Windows, Mac OS) have greased the wheels of desired communion by allowing users to organize data into paper-familiar devices such as files, folders and recycling bins. To continue to ease hesitant minds and facilitate more widespread digital migration, Sellen & Harper underline how new technologies are being developed \u201cto look and feel more paperlike.\u201d (<\/span>41)\u00a0<\/span>From Kindles to Kobos, e-books are trying diligently to emulate the affordances of books and pages (including opaque screens, portability, margins, annotation features and patina) \u2013 prompting the aforementioned Bob Stein to proclaim in the era of e-reading, \u201cWe\u2019re in 1464 \u2013 the infancy of Gutenberg\u2019s press \u2013 and everything is poised to change.\u201d (<\/span>42)\u00a0<\/span>Making things new by making them more the same, such concessions to the legacy of paper allow us to dig niches in the heart of the machine, and maintain the necessary delusions to get beyond our fears. As a foil to the \u201chumanizing\u201d of digital memory he believes crucial, Mayer-Schonberger warns that, \u201cToo perfect a re-call, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past behind.\u201d (<\/span>43)<\/span><\/p>\n Instead \u2013 in the same way that the author reflects his\/her apparatus \u2013 the equivocality, vulnerability and contingency of paper is a more accurate mirror of the human mind in its very <\/span>in<\/span><\/i>accuracy. To better reflect the slippage, sfumato, and subjectivity of human memory, Johnson believes that digital texts will evolve the way of Wikipedia, \u201cwhere the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox.\u201d (<\/span>44)\u00a0<\/span>Rather than finish and authority, the digital \u201cpage\u201d could be a palimpsest of gathering, gesture and \u2013 ultimately \u2013 a renewal of man\u2019s earliest ways of knowing himself and the world. The always prescient McLuhan believed as much, highlighting the ways mass media (radio, TV, film) pushed the written word \u201cback\u201d to its origins; towards spontaneous shifts and a freedom of the spoken idiom. In his words, \u201c[New media] aided us in the recovery of an intense awareness of facial language and body gesture.\u201d (<\/span>45)\u00a0<\/span>Thus emphasizing man\u2019s fundamental role in the life of information, he goes on to add that, \u201cIf these \u2018mass media\u2019 should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won\u2019t be because there\u2019s anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we\u2019ve failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage.\u201d (<\/span>46)<\/span><\/p>\n In this light, if the birth of paper once narrowed the recollection of human vernacular, its life has allowed us to record great things, and romanticize them into even greater things. If the passing of paper obscures such memories \u2013 both real and imagined \u2013 its resurrection into an omnipresent, immaterial digital state affords new space for us, for the children of this apparatus, to collectively become the next page.<\/span><\/p>\n – Steven Matijcio 2012<\/span><\/p>\n About the author.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Steven Matijcio is the present curator at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and a former curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York and has held positions in a number of galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. Matijcio is a lecturer and published writer, and in 2011 was a curator in residence in Gwangju, South Korea and Berlin, Germany. He won a 2010 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for the project “paperless” and in 2012 he was the curator of the fourth Narracje Festival in Gdansk, Poland. Matijcio was also commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 2003 to curate one of their first online exhibitions.<\/p>\n Matijcio is responsible for the Inside Out: Artists in the Communities II<\/em> project that took place at SECCA in 2010. Inside Out II was a varied event aimed at mixing up different organizations and communities, and included walks, temporary sculpture and street art. At its root, it was meant to, in his own words, turn \u201cthe familiar into the unfamiliar\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\nNotes<\/h5>\n
1 <\/span>Giorgio Agamben, <\/span>What is an Apparatus? <\/span><\/i>(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.<\/span><\/h6>\n
2 <\/span>Ibid.<\/span><\/h6>\n
3 <\/span>Viktor Mayer-Scho?nberger quoted in Stuart Jeffries, \u201cWhy we must remember to delete \u2013 and forget \u2013 in the digital age,\u201d <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/i>, 30 June 2011. Mayer-Scho?nberger\u2019s stepfather\u2019s diary included such quotid- ian notations as the daily temperature, and the quality of butter he had eaten that day. <http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2011\/jun\/30\/remember-delete-forget-digital-age><\/span><\/h6>\n
4 <\/span>Vannevar Bush quoted in Abigail J. Sellen & Richard H. R. Harper, <\/span>The Myth of the Paperless Office <\/span><\/i>(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), 4.<\/span><\/h6>\n
5 <\/span>James Jerome Gibson cited in Sellen & Harper, 17. The theory of \u201caffordances\u201d is elaborated in American psychologist J.J. Gibson\u2018s seminal 1979 book <\/span>The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/h6>\n
6 <\/span>Timothy Barrett quoted in Mark Levine, \u201cCan a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization?\u201d <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i>, 17 February 2012. In Alexandra Perloff-Giles\u2019 2011 <\/span>Harvard Gazette <\/span><\/i>article \u201cWhat books mean as objects,\u201d Harvard English professor Leah Price fondly reflects upon years spent in libraries looking for the physical presence\/evidence of human use \u2013 savoring the discovery of \u201cwhich pages have been cut, or which pages have been worn down by the mark of successive thumbs… coffee spills or wax stains from reading by candlelight.\u201d <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/02\/19\/magazine\/timothy-barrett-papermaker.html?pagewanted=all><\/span><\/h6>\n
7 <\/span>David L. Small, <\/span>Rethinking the Book <\/span><\/i>(Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT, 1999). A Thesis submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the re- quirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. <http:\/\/acg.media.mit.edu\/projects\/thesis\/DSThesis.pdf><\/span><\/h6>\n
8 <\/span>Douglas Coupland, \u201cInsects\u201d in the Time Capsules series. <\/span>The New York Times: The Opinion Pages<\/span><\/i>, 31 August 2006.<\/span><\/h6>\n
<http:\/\/coupland.blogs.nytimes.com\/2006\/08\/31\/insects\/><\/span><\/h6>\n
9 <\/span>Barrett quoted in Levine.<\/span><\/h6>\n
10 <\/span>Dr. Dorothea Eimert quoted in Therese Weber, <\/span>The Language of Paper: A History of 2000 Years <\/span><\/i>(Bang- kok, Thailand: The Orchid Press, 2007), xiv.<\/span><\/h6>\n
11 <\/span>Paper is being abandoned as an archival material, despite Edward Tenner\u2019s claim that, in a side-by-side historical comparison, acid-free paper actually lasts <\/span>