One of my favorite stories by Clay Shirky is about Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponhiem. The Abbot wrote about the value of the scribal tradition in an effort to save the tradition from being lost in the advent of Gutenberg's moveable type. Unfortunately, in order to get the word out cheaply and quickly, he skipped the scribes and had the treatise set in moveable type. In the words of Mr. Shirky, "...the Abbot's book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them."
I love irony.
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