New technology discovers itself
Indices
- Referencing of identical copies
- Cross referencing
Notes:
The principle goes beyond the living together of successive technologies. New technologies imitate old technologies until they discover their own “rules.” Like this example, printed books stood on their heads to pretend they were manuscripts for at least the first fifty years of printing with moveable types. It was not until the end of the fifteenth century that it dawned on people that printed texts, as opposed to manuscript texts, were almost always on the same pages in every copy. It would therefore make sense to compile tables of contents and alphabetical topical indexes with page numbers to tell the reader where important information could be found, because the information was usually identical in each and every copy of the edition. In manuscript such an effort would have been valid only for one copy. In print, one effort was valid for hundreds or thousands of copies of a text. The consequences of referencing identical copies (and eventually cross-referencing) are well known.