Motus Mentis

This caught my eye:

US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email

Non-electronic communication will soon be a thing of the past. It’s interesting that the simplest of technologies — a packet of paper, a drop of wax — made possible, for thousands of years, something that for most people will soon be a thing of the past as well: to deliver a message with the assurance that it had not been read by others. Yes, it can still be done; you can still send mail in paper envelopes. But when the mail service finally becomes obsolete, and you’ll need to send such things by courier, who will bother?

On the other hand: sometimes such messages were read by people other than the intended recipients. A friend of mine just found in an attic a box of courtship letters sent by her grandparents to one another almost a century ago. That sort of thing won’t happen any more, either.

All of this has always just been information. But information always requires a physical substrate. We’re moving through a kind of phase transition: the world of books and letters, where information had to be carried from place to place on discrete and bulky objects, was, you might say, a cold world. Metaphorically, it was a solid state: things moved slowly, lasted a long time, and distant particles rarely interacted. It was an ice world — and if you can measure distance by the time it takes for two things to come together, it was a much bigger world. Things are now heating up very rapidly indeed.

Physical books will still be around for a while — certainly, those already printed aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — but I wonder how much longer it will be profitable to print new ones.

Keep in mind also that e-books can be silently updated through the reading device. Even history books.