In context

Is the purported interconnectedness of all books in the forthcoming digital age a good thing? A related question: is there a more ephemeral and probably useless job title than "futurist?" (Text Patterns)

Just yesterday I was teaching a class how to use Google Books and Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature to find passages in the books they’re going to be writing their papers on. But I already dread what this is going to do to my students’ papers once they seriously glom on to these new technologies. I’ll have essay after essay analyzing every occurrence of a particular word in a novel or long poem. Why? because that’s what these technologies see: words, or, more precisely, strings of characters. Papers built on the powers of string search will find every use of the word “honor” in the Iliad, but may well be blind to passages in which honor is granted or withheld without the word being used, or where some related concept is invoked: “glory,” say. To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; so someone with a search engine, every book looks like a set of strings.