Let’s not be too quick to let the internet document our history

Steve Stannard is a former Massey University academic and small business owner in Palmerston North.

OPINION: I can’t remember the last time I put pen to paper and wrote an old-fashioned letter using my once well-honed cursive writing.

It was probably correspondence to my long-passed grandmothers, to which they’d then reply with their shaky but once graceful script revealing what was going on in their world.

I’ve kept some of their letters to remember them by.

While the demise of the written letter is nearly complete, the “vehicle” for the communication, paper, is still used. Even if it’s a statement from the bank or your council rates notice.

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In the work place the much-mooted paperless office hasn’t eventuated as many still prefer to print and read from paper rather than a screen. Paper documents are now generally not kept, though hopefully recycled.

Historically, the advent of paper made a huge difference to what how we understand and see the world.

At his father Philip’s insistence, a teenage Alexander the Great was tutored by Plato’s pupil Aristotle, so developed an appreciation of knowledge and the science of logic.

When Alexander built his famous city in Egypt it included a museum. When he died his right-hand man Ptollomy I “inherited” Egypt.

Ptollomy, who became Pharoh, also knew the importance of new knowledge, and the Museum at Alexandria became the “home” for famous authors and philosophers like Callimachus and Eratosthenes.

Part of that museum was the famous library, where knowledge created was recorded on papyrus, copied and stored so that it would not be lost.

But as author HG Wells notes in his ‘’Short History of the World’’, they were stymied by an inability to reproduce what they’d written because papyrus was their medium for recording knowledge.

The long rolls were difficult for anyone to read, and certainly anyone who was from the “street” could not access them. Furthermore, many of the manuscripts and the knowledge contained in them didn’t make it past the destruction of the library later on.

As Wells also notes, “Aristotles’s work upon methods of thinking carried the science of logic to a level at which it remained for 1500 years or more, until the mediaeval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again.“

Even they were then hampered by having to write in parchment, a media difficult to create. Cue the monastic scribes who enabled the bible to persist, but restricted religious knowledge to the few with access and who could read.

The “power” of religion remained within the church because few could see the “Word”. For the masses Christianity was word of mouth, statues, and stain-glass windows.

It wasn’t until interaction with the Chinese and their ‘’paper’’ centuries later which provided a better medium for recording knowledge. The invention of the printing press was the game changer, allowing mass printing on cellulose-based paper and then the populous to see information that was until then the preserve of very few. Cue the reformation.

Formation of interest groups such as Académie Montmort (France) and the Royal Society (England) in the mid-17th century expended on the ideas of Aristotle and later philosophers such as Francis Bacon to undertake scientific work based on logic and experimentation.

You can still see what the members of these groups were up because much of it was written down on paper, then printed, and preserved. And those early ‘’transactions’’ (journal articles) underpin much of our modern scientific knowledge.

Although oral presentation was important back then, accurate preservation of what was said, and wide dissemination of that information through paper is what gave science and what still gives science its power.

We have entered the age of AI and its derivations, including ChatGP. Anything online is open for update, change, or corruption, whether that be for good or evil. Online-only records have little or no archival value, with an historical value weaker even than word of mouth alone.

I fear logic and good scientific experimentation will suffer.

Maybe paper will make a comeback? Perhaps our children will even be taught cursive writing again? Otherwise, how will their grandchildren really know what’s going on in our world now?

I guess they could build a time machine.