Chuck,
I agree that a common language and/or language in general is a key to
communicating, but the basis of understanding mass copying is not sharing just
language, but knowledge, information. Before Gutenburg, copying was slow,
painstaking, and the resultant copies of books, maps, etc., were expensive and available
to only a few. And the storing of knowledge and archiving was very selective
and took only one catastrophe for scarce and valuable information/knowlege to
be lost forever. It's harder to lose thousands and even millions of copies of
something than tens or, at the most, hundreds.
Another point is that information shared and stored simply by language (the
spoken word) and in peoples mind can become distorted from the original intent
or meaning over periods of time. Most of us are familiar with the game in
which a group sits in a circle, and the first person whispers something in the
next person's ear, then they in the next person's and on and on until the message
comes back to the original person. The message is quite often quite different
and distorted from the original.
And think of ease. This lit serve would be at the least impractical, if not
impossible, if it depended on the members to call each other to continue the
discussion. E-mail with mass recip[ients by way of a list, is copying.
So, I think the idea of copying has its very real place.
Paul Tosh, M.F.A.
Assistant Professor Art & Art History
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Fine Arts Building 205
5100 Rockhill Road
Kansas City, MO 64111
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(816) 235-6204 office
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