>yet we don't run around screaming that automated printing has destroyed writing.
I disagree in part. There have been many complaints voiced about bots in modern digital book distribution producing tons of crap and flooding markets like amazon.com with junk. It doesn't take very many processes like this to produce a corpus of information larger than has been created by mankind. So in some sense of the word, bots have 'destroyed' writing by volume. Now that said, most of it will never be seen in a place where it causes interruption to shoppers or readers, as it will get filtered out by the distributors. That said, this makes a mess of unfiltered distributed systems of digital books.
Where bots can flood the market with junk, bots can flag and remove junk books, or at least push them down in terms of visibility. The problem is Amazon doesn't seem the least bit motivated to even try here.
I disagree in part. There have been many complaints voiced about bots in modern digital book distribution producing tons of crap and flooding markets like amazon.com with junk. It doesn't take very many processes like this to produce a corpus of information larger than has been created by mankind. So in some sense of the word, bots have 'destroyed' writing by volume. Now that said, most of it will never be seen in a place where it causes interruption to shoppers or readers, as it will get filtered out by the distributors. That said, this makes a mess of unfiltered distributed systems of digital books.