Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
The thing that concerns me most is that, in the digital age, if we fail to make efforts to maintain the value of our content, there is the high possibility for the value to be greatly reduced, as the history of the music industry has shown.
Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.
It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.
Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.
Curation is everything.
By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.
I've got 8 and 10 year old kids telling me about the match I had with Savage at WrestleMania III and that was 30 years before they were even born. But with the magic of the Internet, their dad tells them to watch a little bit of what they used to watch... It amazes me that we're passing it on from generation to generation.
Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.
We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.
As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.
In digital, you can maintain the quality.
I love documenting. Having these videos forever is priceless to me, so I think I will be doing it forever, but who knows if YouTube is gonna be around forever.
But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.
Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?
Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.
Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met.
An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
A written word gets preserved in so many forms. But movies which comprise of both audio and visuals have to be done with care and a lot more details.
The Constitution is a 200-year-old parchment, simply because we digitize the words should not suggest their meanings change.
The world's information is digital. The web, the news, all of that is digital. And now... we have ten million books scanned. That was the last bastion of what was offline; it's now online and accessible.
While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.
