Writing has been around for a very long time. We all know that there is some text which has been around since the 1400s produced by German inventor Johannes Gutenberg and distributed widely. Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press had a fundamental effect on the production of text because the printed copies produced were all the same.

The printing press also sped up the process, as it could produce more than 3 500 pages daily, compared with 40 by hand printing and a few by hand-copying. It also led to the production of the first multiple versions of the Bible which, for a long time, were the only multiple versions of the same texts produced. All other writing at the time was based on the reproduction of individual writing or records which were written out by hand and subsequently recorded for people to read as single productions of text to be used over years.

The single production texts could not last and as time passed and printed text developed, single production texts disappeared completely. In some cases, there were similar texts where similar productions (but not identical) were gathered together to create groups of produced texts which were used as one; for example, William Shakespeare’s First Folio is a collection of documents which are nearly identical but have slight amendments and differences arising from their use in producing the actual play for which they were used. (There are not a lot these and the actual story of the First Folio is a little bit more complicated than set out here.)

If we take matters forward from Shakespeare’s time (1564 to 1616), a considerable period has elapsed from when the first Bible rolled off the Gutenberg press to modern digital publications. The period is of the order of five hundred years, which is longer than the time taken for South America to become civilised, for South Africa to exist as a country and for various other areas to become developed economies.

We know that much of the development of modern text took place over the last 150 years; most of modern development, as we know it, is relatively recent. For this reason, we could expect the demise of written text, yet it persists.

This indicates that modern text is more than just a set of languages recorded as a number of words in a specific way, in the way that Gutenberg’s was recorded. We would have to take a sudden leap and assume, perhaps, that modern text is way more than just a set of words copied out and which is reproduced to produce other words. This brings us to a fundamental argument: is modern text (or any text) a device which is infinitely long and can last forever? Could it be possible that modern text can never die because it can always be infinitely reproduced as some new thing?

This is quite forward thinking, but we’ve nothing that says otherwise. We have millions and millions of documents of written text of all languages that have been created and it’s not been possible to destroy any of them permanently. What this then has, as a logical follow-on, is that text exists as a permanent creation of something which can never die. This all sounds very unlikely, but we have nothing to prove the contrary.

One can think of Pandora’s Box in this regard, where, once words are unleashed, they cannot be taken back. This is particularly true in this modern age, where, once something is tweeted and shared and goes viral, it cannot be retracted. Even this article is now part of human history. That’s quite a thought!

We all know that there are certain documents and texts which have been lost for various reasons. However, most documents survived, as they had been reproduced many times.

If all this sounds kind of complicated, buy me a beer and I’ll explain it to you at length. If the night gets longer, we could even make it a whisky. The number of theories possible is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol imbibed.