Punch-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (review)

420 Indeed, the last sentence of the book concedes defeat in that regard, though it’s not his fault; that’s how history is. He writes, “Maybe the most significant thing that we can learn from putting today’s digital reading and writing in the context of five thousand years of literacy history, using past results to predict future performance, is that the digitized text permeating our lives today is the next stage, not the last stage, in the saga of human communication, and that it’s impossible to tell from what we’re doing now exactly where it is that we will be going with our words tomorrow” (p. 246).