from the paper to the cloud

For some time, I’ve noticed that what constitutes the “real” copy of a text has been slowly drifting into cyberspace and Platonic abstraction. Back in the early 90s, when I discovered computing, it was understood that you had to have a printer in order to take what was on the screen and make a real document out of it. Word processing was just moving the words around on-screen in preparation for printing. In high school and into my early undergraduate years, I seldom bothered to save a word processing document that had already been printed out and turned in.

It was the ubiquity of Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and email that changed all of this. We became accustomed to shuttling documents around, reading them onscreen, inserting our edits and then shuttling them back. Increasingly, you seldom printed a document out unless you wanted something handy to mark up. Once you were done marking it up, it went in the white paper recycling bin, because what else could you do with it? Type it back in? It was no longer a living, editable, emailable text. It was just dead paper.

Next up: the document moves from our individual hard drives and inboxes, where multiple copies of the same document in different drafts might exist in confusion, to online storage with versioning. Our one-off electronic copies are being pushed away from the center by group-editable, online-only master texts, just as they themselves once pushed off the paper copies.

In the post-cyberspace world, paper will be redeemed. Ubiquitous cameras combined with advanced OCR will pull in the static printed text and transform it again into a living document, and electronic ink displays will put the text back in our hands. But it will remain the case that any copy is just a shadow of the Form; destroy it and the text will live on.