maybe, but i don't find his other reasons -- "The key difference is that it's slower" and "It's easier to edit" -- pedestrian in the least. i've with him.

Right. Stephenson overlooks the fact that the vast majority of seventeenth-century documents are gone, or inaccessible, not because of the material of/from/upon which they were created, but because no one worked to preserve them.

On the other hand, I suspect that there will be a great many electronic documents that survive for 300 years or more not because of preservation efforts (though I think these will prove important), but because of their ordinary, promiscuous proliferation across multiple storage devices that themselves happen to survive. Email attachments, browser caches, usenet groups, PDA ebook libraries. Electronic documents replicate and replicate and replicate.

Errr. To clarify: my "Right" was an agreement with Matt's observation. David and I were composing comments at the same time.

I agree with both of you. There is a distinction between preservation as a social activity and the physical survival of the source media. Yes, paper is pretty durable in that regard. But our ability to preserve a substantial number of electronic documents and records will in large measure depend on our ability to continue to read/access 8-bit ASCII. George is absolutely right about the proliferation--in fact, the intro to my book addresses just that point with a detailed case study.

Stephenson's remarks about editing longhand are counter-intuitive enough to be interesting: it's easier to scratch something out with a pencil than to backspace? The instinct is to suggest the opposite, but I actually think I know what he means: in electronic composition the distinction between drafts tends to melt away--the document is in a continual state of revision, and it's finished only when you stop working on it.

I don't get David Silver's endorsement of the claim that paper is "slower" and "easier to edit". Ever edit an image on screen? Remember eraser smudge? Is it not the case that in the electronic medium, the ease of editing is related to facility in reproducing copies? That is assuming that editing involves version control.

i wasn't talking about editing images and neither was neal i believe.

i have little knowledge about preservation but i do think there's all kinds of ways to write words. seems to me that neal is as prolific as they come, no? so something is working i imagine. i feel as though all of us, those of us brought up with computers, do all of our writing on screen and i think that's sort of a shame.

Just a thought about my previous comment: I wonder if digital rights management efforts (which typically attempt to restrict the number of copies made of an electronic file) will mean that information most closely guarded will be least likely to survive.

David, I do a lot of writing on paper because of the focus it provides. It keeps me from getting distracted from all the other options available via my computer.

David,

Image versus verbal artefact -- it's a herring meant to underscore the relation between copying, transcription and editing which could be conceived as a species of translation.

Some of us, for various reasons, use screen with keyboard, computer with voice recognition software, paper (bound and looseleaf), whiteboard, chalkboard, tape recorder.

Some of us do our writing while riding mass transit, sitting in a cafe, at the kitchen table, in a cubicle, in an office.

Given the various sites and means, I question the too automatic link between speed, ease and quality. There is a matrix of tales to be told here. And most of the tales that do get told are inflected perhaps more by habits of telling than habits of of the practices they tell about.