Scrolling Forward
Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
David M. Levy
- 268 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Scrolling Forward
Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
David M. Levy
About This Book
Like Henry Petroski's The Pencil, David Levy's Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.We are surrounded daily by documents of all kindsâletters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pagesâyet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are being disturbed and transformed by new technologies and practices.An expert on information and written forms, and a former researcher for the document pioneer Xerox, Levy masterfully navigates these concerns, offering reassurance while sharing his own excitement about many of the new kinds of emerging documents. He demonstrates how today's technologies, particularly the personal computer and the World Wide Web, are having analogous effects to past inventionsâsuch as paper, the printing press, writing implements, and typewritersâin shaping how we use documents and the forms those documents take. Scrolling Forward lets us see the continuity between the written forms of today and those of the past.