With the advent of the technological boon within the last decade alone, the issue of credibility and fixity have changed drastically from the past. Just as the invention of the printing press had changed the world of literature in the past, internet databases and web pages have, in a weird way, both simplified and complicated these two issues in different ways.
In olden times, credibility could be iffy. As books were hand made in this time it would have been a fairly simple matter to copy someone other's work and claim it as your own. the Invention of printing presses have eased the matter credibility by giving information to reinforce it, such as publishing the publishing company, copyright date, etc, etc. Because of this we can then determine the book's credibility. Another advantage is fixity. Printing helped to alleviate the various mistakes and changes of interpretations caused by scribes who had to hand write each copy of the book. This created uniformed books that that, according to Adrian Johns (reading pgs 4-5), helped to stabilize several aspects of of life such as law, language, and science due to the consistency created by identical texts.
However, the internet has both simplified researching credibility and fixity while making it more difficult in some aspects. It is a well known fact that with enough time and effort one can find pretty much anything on the internet. with the myriad of search engines available it is usually an easy task to track down information concerning a book's credibility. however, these same advantages can also lead one on a wild goose chase. Anybody can publish something thanks to the internet, be it something intellectually stimulating, creative, or downright insane. There are just as many, and likely even more, acts of fallacy and pirating out there raising the difficulty of ascertaining the work's credibility.
Yet if one knows where to look, they can find the same signs that they would see in printed texts to help discover how trustworthy the article is, such as citations, publisher, etc. Copyright and plagiarism laws have been created and modified to include the internet and reduce piracy, adding to the heavy regulations created for printing and other medias that provide the tools to identify credibility and promote fixity.
So, in conclusion, the advent of internet makes things easier by providing tools and resources for authors, while simultaneously adding a level of difficulty due to the vast amount of content it opens us up to.
