I hope we can all overcome this irrational fear of technology, especially when hiding behind the term “sacredness.” It reminds me of a Baptist preacher I knew in the ’80s who said technology was the work of the devil, somehow linking it to the evilness of bar codes. Does anyone else remember this business with bar codes?

Words can be sacred, no matter if they’re copied by hand, printed with a press or appear on a computer screen. How does that detract from the message?

This is a point I’m trying to make in the article. Web 2.0 can cast “the message” wider and better than traditional media. And that’s the goal of growth, isn’t it?

I worked for a Jewish non-profit that has a budget of $2m and the Director only learned to use a computer in 2003!

How ’bout this for a waste of trees — the secretary actually PRINTED out all the emails so the Director could read them — until s/he got the hang of things (reading incoming mail). Then it took another year for him/her to respond to emails with a one sentence reply.

Yep, s/he kept talking about the sacredness of the written word!

Ezra