Paper became a pivotal technology for a subsequent explosion in the transmission of knowledge.
- Orietta Da Rold
How’s this for a measure of the pace of the tech revolution? Twenty years ago, you would have read this article only on paper; now it is also available on your tablet, smartphone or computer. The impact of digital media has become so pervasive that even remarking upon it feels trite. Where predictions that printed books and newspapers are dying once seemed far-fetched, the future now seems less certain.
If we do become a paperless society, we will be terminating a relationship with one of the most successful technologies of all time; one that has endured for 700 years in England, and much longer elsewhere. Our reliance on paper runs so deep that it seems strange to think of it as technology at all. Yet to a person living in 14th-century England, paper would have been an advanced new material. Most writing was on parchment (made from animal skin), and an alternative made of pulped rags represented a truly disruptive innovation.
“Paper was economical – not in the sense that it was cheap, but because it was lighter, more portable and enabled you to write more,” explains Dr Orietta Da Rold from the Faculty of English and St John's College.
“Its arrival had a huge impact. People could share ideas in a way that hadn’t happened before. Paper became a pivotal technology for a subsequent explosion in the transmission of knowledge.”
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Image: Page from an edition of The Brus, produced in the early 15th century, and an example of an early manuscript on paper
Credit: St John's College Library, Cambridge
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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