Born to Be Digital ; Preserving the Dna of Civilization

Summary

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Luddites of the world, awake. Pixels have been working magic while you've slept. Pixels have not replaced the word, but preserved it in a different form. Scanned books are not burned books. Digitized information has opened learning to a new generation of readers.

Having been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the interactive world of digital mega-data, I've been persuaded that pixels those tiny dots that make up the digital image are not the most subversive things to come down the information highway since moveable type replaced the monks who inscribed ancient texts. Like everything else in the digital world, electronic postings can be good or ill, harnessed to expand knowledge or used to reduce critical thought. It's up to us (as it always is).

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Extract

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Born to Be Digital ; Preserving the Dna of Civilization

I was surprised to find an ally in Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He has written 14 books, most of them about the Italian Renaissance. And as we talked over vitell...

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