Beware the shift in technology

In reading Landow’s talk of digitizing print books, I think immediately of a Buffy episode which articulates the turn-of-the-millennium conflict between print and digital media. Landow asks why we would do it, why retype a book or scan it onto a computer, and Buffy and her friends provide some, if not all, of the answers why, and one reason why not, though that might not apply in the real world.
Mr. Giles has a job as the school librarian, but that is just so he can be close to Buffy all day, since he is her mentor, trainer, and information source, known as a Watcher to her Slayer. (Also so he can be near the Hellmouth, which is located directly below the library, but that’s another issue) He has an enormous collection of rare and ancient books, codices, and manuscripts, dealing mostly with demons, spells, and other magical subjects, of which he is justifiably proud. The Slayer and her friends are not nearly as careful with these tomes as a scholar would like, and so he decides to scan them into the computer for searchability. If Giles had been less secrecy-conscious, or Willow more independent-minded, they could have made a website and database from this information, and helped other demon hunters around the world, possibly even other Watchers and their Potential Slayers. Giles himself has said that many of his volumes are unique or the only surviving copy, and certainly his girlfriend, computer teacher and self-professed “techno-pagan” Ms Calendar, has done online research to help them with cases. However, I understand that such things were left out to streamline story, so I can't really object.
The problem must come, of course, and in this case it is that one of the texts is a powerful summoning spell, and the process of scanning it acts like reading it, and the demon materializes within the school network. It is unclear whether or not it can get to the rest of the Web from there, but he concentrates on Willow anyway, so it seems to be a moot point. He woos her and nearly kills her before Buffy rescues her and banishes him. The overt lesson is that people you meet on the Internet are generally not what they appear, especially if they won’t send you a picture or talk to you on the phone, but there is another lesson. Knowledge is power, and the Internet makes it very easy to share both, so you have to pay attention to what you put on the computer, because it can take on a life of its own very easily.