Lecture et écriture du texte numérique

There once was a time, in the history of this society, when the ability of people to convey meaning was enriched by their knowledge of and access to the work of creative minds from across the centuries.  No more. Conversation and letters today, like education, have become enfeebled by emphasis on the functional and the purely contemporary.  The result is a mechanization not just of the way we live but of the way we think, and of the human spirit itself.

To the extent, then, that man fails to make the distinction between the intermediate operations of electronic intelligence and the ultimate responsibilities of human decision and conscience, the computer could obscure man’s awareness of the need to come to terms with himself.  It may foster the illusion that he is asking fundamental questions when actually he is asking only functional ones.  It may be regarded as a substitute for intelligence instead of an extension of it. It may promote undue confidence in concrete answers.  “If we begin with certainties,” Bacon said, “we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient with them, we shall end in certainties.”

Nothing really happens to a man except as it is registered in the subconscious.  This is where event and feeling become memory and where the proof of life is stored

Connaître un objet ne consiste pas, en effet, à collectionner les informations relatives à cet objet.

la compétence est une composante indissociable de toute connaissance

la connaissance doit s’appuyer sur des institutions, des universités, des traditions, des principes…

On va aussi à la bibliothèque pour y retrouver dans le calme des documents que les autres médias détruisent ou noient dans le renouvellement insatiable de leur production ou on utilise les services d’un bibliothécaire ou d’un documentaliste pour retrouver les informations utiles perdues dans le chaos général.

Le livre numérique sonne-t-il le glas du livre papier ? Ou faut-il plutôt parier, à l’inverse, sur une coexistence durable des deux supports, dans un rapport de complémentarité ? Sans oublier la question de la distribution, où libraires et plateformes en ligne sont à la recherche du modèle économique leur permettant de fonctionner.

des ressources internet répertoriées par les bibliothécaires

Isidore, the bishop of Seville, remarked how reading “the sayings” of thinkers in books “render[ed] their escape from memory less easy.”

Shakespeare has Hamlet call his memory “the book and volume of my brain.”

Books provide a supplement to memory, but they also, as Eco puts it, “challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.”