The Document is Dead
How the Internet was the beginning of the end for paper and digital documents
One of the most revolutionary inventions of our time is the document. The ability to not have to spend countless hours carving your message into stone, or impermanently drawing it in the sand became one of the easiest and quickest ways to share information. The ability to create, store, and share information is one of the most powerful differentiators of us as a species.
Fast-forward to computers, which gave people the ability to create documents quickly and easily, without having to make a hard copy until that document had conceptually matured in binary form. Plus, they could be copied to other binary-based mediums quickly and easily, allowing us to distribute information far quicker than before.
As soon as computers could talk to each other, the time it took for us to share documents (as files) with anyone in the world reached a near-zero point — dependent only on the speed of the connection at hand between sender and receiver.
The power to share a document with anyone in the world in near-zero time is a revolutionary feat — but it doesn’t stop there. One of the final steps towards connecting our brains is letting go of documents once and for all.
The inherent problem of documents is that they were designed without the idea of the Internet. On the Internet, you don’t need to put information in a file — its contents can go directly on a page where people can consume it immediately, just like this blog post. When information isn’t in a file, it can be created, read, updated, and deleted with little to no effort.
On the Internet, using files is like putting flaps over every photo in a photo album. Like putting every book on your bookshelf inside a box. Like putting drapes over every whiteboard in your office.
What if YouTube only contained links to videos that you had to download before you watched them?
What if Wikipedia only contained PowerPoint files and Word documents?
On the Internet, files and documents do not have a place.
If you want to share your ideas with others, they need to be put directly onto the internet in their purest form — typically text, an image, audio, or video.
Otherwise, you might as well be carving your message in stone.
