When everything goes digital, I think that it is books and vinyl records that I will miss the most. How do we make things last, make our knowledge and our works of fiction more durable than ourselves? The more advanced the technology we use for information storage, the more difficult for future generations of researchers and archaeologists to recover that which we have recorded. So much of what we know of past generations and civilizations has been learned from what they wrote, on paper, parchment, carved in wood or clay, or chiseled out on stone tablets. And even the fanciest stone tablet works without any power supply other than daylight. It’s physical.
Blurry books © Bjørnar Andre Haveland
Who, in several thousand years, will succeed in trying to extract the collected works of Shakespeare from archaic memory cards, hard drives, compact discs or DVDs worn by time, even assuming that they will last that long, when the knowledge of how to communicate with those digital media is long lost? Connections? Voltage? Bit order? File systems? Encoding? Checksums? Error correction? Encryption? And that’s assuming that we even use physical media; with each passing day, more and more is thrown into the clouds, both metaphorically and literally.
Over the Hedge, June 22nd, 2013.
Are we using anything akin to the stone tablets of old to preserve what we have and love, for those who come after us? Memory sticks are neat and practical for us now, but I’d hate to be the archaeologist five thousand years hence, who is trying to figure out how the heck to squeeze anything sensible out of them. Nothing beats a good book, if only it could be printed on stone paper.
A book in the hand, is better than ten in the cloud.
Random thoughts based on a Facebook post from 2013.
Footnotes
- Stone paper is in fact a thing, but its durability is another. From what I read, it degrades as quicky and easily as regular paper, if not even more so.
inshadowz: out of context 
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