A Book or a Dictionary?
In his excellent book The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester makes a obvious but important point. Shakespeare couldn’t look anything up in a dictionary. Not only were there no dictionaries; the whole notion of “looking something up” didn’t exist back then.
In an even earlier day (although not as much earlier as you might think), Johannes Gutenberg couldn’t buy a book that was just the same as any other. Books, in those days, were handmade, one-off items.
Both the creation of the dictionary and the creation of movable type vastly changed the world for many people. Web browsing has changed the world too, although I don’t pretend to know whether it’s nearly as big a change. The question I’ve been toying with lately, is this: is the browser “movable type”, or is it “the dictionary”? Or is it something more subtle, like what Aldus Manutius did in creating the octavo book that was easy to carry and (relatively) affordable? I don’t have an answer; I’m just wondering about it.
It’s both movable type and a dictionary. Wikipedia in your pocket, web pages written once distributed to the world.