What's the point of going to all this trouble to build machines
capable of displaying digital text if we can't exploit the basic
interactivity of that text? People don't want to read on a screen just
for the thrill of it; even with the iPad's beautiful display, reading
on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on
the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books
and magazines, but that's not the only promise of the technology. The
promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of
association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to
create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And
yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.
-- Steven Berlin Johnson "The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book" (April 23, 2010)
(transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture (April 22, 2010) at Columbia University,
subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text."
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/04/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book.html