Lynn did her doctoral dissertation about Hypercard. The change in writing to allow words to be links in today's familiar format employing hyperlinks in text was one of several new and sometimes upsetting changes in writing, communication, books and libraries. Hypercard was, and maybe is, software that allows for and employs links between words, links that can do all sorts of things. They can take the reader to some other text, launch a playable video, sound a meadowlark . Today, that feature is a normal part of web pages and blogs.
Your typically trained librarian was, at one time, surprised to find that she was expected to somehow organize materials that were not in the physical shape of traditional paper books. This sort of very broad and changing array of materials and types has happened before. You can think back to a time when there was very little writing to be found. Writing is an invention of the last 10,000 years. Photography and movies came during the last couple of centuries. Recordings of sound, voice and music, text for the ear, is more recent still. The world wide web is just decades old.
The changes and newer methods can be pictured as steady betterment but the truth is that things aren't that simple. Just ask someone who has been using Zoom instead of meeting with others in the same room. Talking over a table and glasses of wine is not the same as seeing each other on tv. People are chafing at the difficulty of listening with one ear to the main speaker while talking quietly to a friend in the same meeting. I find that too much modern journalism consists of video-taping or voice recording while an untrained, nervous, showboating person blabs on and on. Had the reporter tried, he could have supplied a reader of print, like me, 100 words that would have nicely captured the speaker's message instead of ten minutes of rambling and repetition.
When I was 10, I told my Scoutmaster I wanted to earn the Boy Scout merit badge for scholarship. He said,"There's a merit badge for scholarship?" There was and there still is. There was and still is a merit badge for reading. "Scholarship" and 'scholar' often refer to having knowledge but the sense of knowledge and its verification, shelf life and implications is changing these days with artificial intelligence, critical analysis, and broad fast communication operating.
