1835 vs. 2005

Aphrodite's birds travel the skies from Paris to Amsterdam, and under their wing is clipped a list of daily quotations from the Stock Exchange; a telegraph sends a message from Paris to Brussels concerning the rise in 3 percent annuities; couriers gallop over highways on panting horses; the ambassadors of real kings bargain with ideal kings, and Nathan Rothschild in London will show you, if you pay him a visit, a casket just arrived from Brazil with freshly mined diamonds intended to cover the interest on the current Brazilian debt. Isn't that interesting?

Karl Gutzkow, Öffentliche Charaktere, part 1 (Hamburg, 1835), p. 280 ("Rothschild").
(citirano u: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999 (2002 paperback), s. 571)

U mojoj glavi, citat iz 1835. koji je Benjamin ispisao oko 1940. podsjeća na sljedeće:

It is late at night, and I am at home, in my study, doing research for a book on the culture of war in Napoleonic Europe. In an old and dreary secondary source, I find an intriguing but fragmentary quotation from a newspaper that was briefly published in French-occupied Italy in the late 1790s. I want to read the entire article from which it came. As little as five years ago, doing this would have required a forty-mile trip from my home in Baltimore to the Library of Congress and some tedious wrestling with a microfiche machine. But now I step over to my computer, open up Internet Explorer, and click to the "digital library" of the French National Library. A few more clicks, and a facsimile copy of the newspaper issue in question is zooming out of my printer. Total time elapsed: two minutes.
It is the next day, and I am in a coffee shop on my university campus, writing a conference paper. A passage from Edmund Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace comes to mind, but I can't remember the exact wording. Finding the passage, as little as five years ago, would have required going to the library, locating the book on the shelf (or not!), and paging through the text in search of the half-remembered material. Instead, on my laptop, I open Internet Explorer, connect to the wireless campus network, and type the words "Burke Letters Regicide Peace" into the Google search window. Seconds later, I have found the entire text online. I search for the words "armed doctrine" and up comes the quote. ("It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country.") Total time elapsed: less than one minute.

(David A. Bell, "What the Internet is Doing to Scholarship: The Bookless Future"; The New Republic on May 2, 2005 and The New Republic Online on April 22, 2005.)