I’m not much of an idealist though. Maybe a jaded idealist.
My indoctrinated American Pragmatism shows through though.
Books are words on paper situated between two pieces of cardboard, distributed through bookstore and library systems, and kept on shelves, classified by the dewey decimal system, alphabetical, library of congress or several other systems. They may also sit in private collections.
Words written here are stored on hard drives on servers, distributed (hopefully) in some sort of RAID or distributed arrangement with several rudundency measures, scheduled backups, and even deleted messages are stored for law enforcement reasons.
Yet, one day, *poof* gone.
Nothing magical about books. Nothing magical about the store-and-forward of the Internet. Nothing magical about words.
It’s the communication that matters – the process of concept transference between human brains over time (well “space and time”, spacetime, whatever).
Oddly enough, it classified my last message as such:
DDC Confidence
410: Linguistics 0.83
120: Epistemology, causation & humankind 0.07
027: General libraries 0.06
Linguistics. Yeah, that’s where it would fit best. Cognitive Linguistics. Good AI – nice job.