First, I think I pretty much agree with what you're saying. Though I'd argue it isn't necessarily the ideas within the books that make the press valuable so much as the ability to rapidly produce and distribute those ideas; something that wasn't possible when books were all hand produced.
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 16:04, Jeffrey Hergan <[email protected]> wrote: > > So Stephen King is more important than the wheel, right? > Or, to put it differently, the US Constitution is a better > achievement than the paper it was written on. Think about what the impact would have been had the person / invention / idea been _removed_ from the world or prevented from being at the time it had been around. Stephen King? Negligible. The wheel? Removing or delaying this would have had a profound impact. Well, I suppose it matters how great the delay was. Or if the wheel _ever_ came about. But perhaps this is an effect of comparing such different things as a person and an invention. The constitution as an idea is easily worth more than the paper it's printed on. A wheel isn't worth as much as "The Wheel" and Stephen King isn't worth as much as "humanity". Humanity is worth more than "The Wheel", but I think "The Wheel" is worth more than any individual. Now I need more coffee and I don't even drink it. This reminds me of when I was a Sophomore in High School and groups had to come up with influential people. I overheard someone in another group come up with Columbus and a girl in the group started to shoot it down saying, "If he didn't 'discover' America, someone else would have, so he's not important." That may be, the Vikings and many others had already been there, but it was still Columbus that brought the news back to Europe. How could anyone be influential under that standard? -- -- -- arno s hautala /-\ [email protected] -- -- _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
