A sobering reminder for the digital age

Barrett,

Thank you for this post. It's rather sobering to think how much of history and heritage may be lost.

Bob
 
rpsawin said:
Thank you for this post. It's rather sobering to think how much of history and heritage may be lost.
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Funny thing is that even in the non-digital age of yore, history and heritage were at risk of being lost. The fact they aren't readily available, and never were, does that. Who will ever have a chance to go to this archive and see the original Steinbeck manuscript? Worse, who ever knew it existed? The same goes for the Lib of Congress, national archives, private archives, museum depots, etc. There's simply too much stored away, and much-if-not-most of it is extremely poorly documented and registered. This has got nothing to do with the digital age. It's a problem that existed from the very moment humanity started to save things for posterity.
 
Wow yes Pherdinand, and I just remember that I read the whole "foundation" cycle about ten years ago, with much passion. I should return back to these books... rather... buy them. Thanks to Barrett for the interesting article.
 
What RML said ... it has always been thus; that history is "lost" from cultural consciousness because it is not accessible to a enough people. As was stated in the article:

' "There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. '

The perception that the web is the source for information is a problem.

There is something to be said for the tradition of oral history.
 
Trius said:
The perception that the web is the source for information is a problem.

There is something to be said for the tradition of oral history.
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Yet even oral tradition lost more than we can remember. How many sonnets, poems, folk lore, myths, fairy tales, etc have been lost over the last, say, 3000 years? Too many to count. What we have left is here by accident because someone took the time to write them down, or because the culture it belongs too is still strong, or because someone rediscovered it on some ancient clay tablet.

But what is lost, is it diminishing our cultures? Is it a loss we can't live with? Is it really such a terrible shame? The closer it is to our time or our modern culture, the more we feel it as a terrible loss. The further back in time and the further away from our culture, the less we care about it. We would lament the loss of a Picasso, the original manuscript of Hemingway, or the original score of a Beethoven symphony. But do we lament the loss of the Persian treasures in the recent Iraq debacle? Do we lament the loss of Chinese art objects in the sacking of Being by the British and English? Do we lament the loss of the original texts of the Maya? Do we lament the loss of graffiti piece from the 80s? Hardly, if at all, simply because it happened too long ago, most people wouldn't even know these objects existed in the first place, and because those cultures have little bearing on our own culture(s). It's only a loss if and when you're attached to in in some way. Most of the time we're not, and than we don't care.
 
I find it ridiculous that the notion of "the web is the source of all information" and "if it isn't on the web, it must not exist" is emerging.
 
Hard to quantify the value of a "loss", as by definition it is lost, forgotten, gone. We have encient languages here in the British Isles such as Cornish and Manx that are in the process of being lost. It's a shame; in Cornwall they seem too concerned about arguing which is the "correct" Cornish dialect instead of recording all the dialects before the native speakers are dead. But whatever happens, life goes on. We cope with losses quire well.
 
There is so much data around as it is, that even if EVERYTHING did end up on the web, some of it would be so far down the list of search pages it wold be "lost" anyway.

Thanks for an intersting read.
 
>>Yet even oral tradition lost more than we can remember. How many sonnets, poems, folk lore, myths, fairy tales, etc have been lost over the last, say, 3000 years? Too many to count.<<

I think, in each generation, people have recognized that there is enduring value to some small number of works of human creation. So they take some effort to help preserve that which they value. That is now we know of ancient songs and poetry and prehistoric cave paintings. The 7 Wonders of the Ancient World are mostly gone, but their existance was recorded. In his lifetime, the texts of Shakespeare's plays were largely known only to his peformers and business partners. After he died, and as they aged, they realized the plays would be lost to human memory if they weren't written down, so they collaborated on the First Folio.

I think that each generation we do lose things of value. But people also record and preseve enormous amounts of information that is of little or no enduring value.
 
Vickko said:
I find it ridiculous that the notion of "the web is the source of all information" and "if it isn't on the web, it must not exist" is emerging.
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I agree. Codswallop! We should also balance loss with the excitement of discovery; my youngest daughter is doing her senior thesis on a one-act play by Sean O'Casey. After doing much research in likely places like London, Dublin and Princeton she found a previously "unknown" version of the play in a New York City public library. Nirvana!
 
amateriat said:
It's not "all out there":

http://tinyurl.com/2eqjed

And there's a good chance that it never will be.


- Barrett
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Interesting, I used to live in Salinas and didn't know about the vault in the bottom floor of that library with his writing. I thought they were all at the Steinbeck house.

I guess if everything is on the web now, what's not on the web is not true. And whatever is on the web, must be true right? "Hey I read it on the web so it has to be true".

That article is a good wake up call. Maybe I'll check out my Library and see what artifacts they have from long ago in this area.
 
Vickko said:
I find it ridiculous that the notion of "the web is the source of all information" and "if it isn't on the web, it must not exist" is emerging.
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In the mostly-forgotten, acid-laced, big-screen political satire Wrong is Right (and, goodness, is this ever a good time for it), members of a terrorist group, arguing over tactics, repeatedly utter the mantra, "Remember, if it doesn't happen on television, it doesn't exist!"

Susbstitute "the Internet" for TV, and the song remains the same.

And, yes, as RML points out, recorded history has been "dying all the time", since we started bothering to write stuff down. Between warfare, inattention and plain old lassitude, lots of things have been lost to time, and much more will be (and, if you want to get into a conversation about entropy and the like, you can just shrug and say that everything will disappear at some point...but it's Sunday night, I'm in a lighthearted mood, and wish to reamin so until Monday kicks in hard). The problem we have now is that the Internet has, for many people, become the equivalent to Douglas Adams' mythical Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a very swoopy, sexy repository of information which is neither complete nor necessarily accurate (the recent dust-ups involving Wikipedia being just one example). This situation is compounded, ironically, by the quantity of preserved history, both near and distant, that we're all bombarded with on a daily basis without even walking outside our doors, too much of it of a truly trivial nature. With this much seeming information overload, how many people want to think about potentially useful or vital historical information slipping thorugh our collective fingers?


- Barrett
 
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RML said:
This has got nothing to do with the digital age. It's a problem that existed from the very moment humanity started to save things for posterity.
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Wrong. You are too young to remember the promise of the digital age when it was first ushered in. The "promise" of instant access to science, art, literature...not to mention computers & the digital revolution was going to help us work less, thereby giving us increased freetime, and make us wealthier as well!

Yeah, well big suprise that it did exactly that for a few. But my point is exactly about the "digital age".

Best Regards,

Bob
 
rpsawin said:
Wrong. You are too young to remember the promise of the digital age when it was first ushered in. The "promise" of instant access to science, art, literature...not to mention computers & the digital revolution was going to help us work less, thereby giving us increased freetime, and make us wealthier as well!

Yeah, well big suprise that it did exactly that for a few. But my point is exactly about the "digital age".
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Since I was born in 1970 I guess I must have missed the beginning of the digital age indeed.

Even when the first pc became available to the "masses", I never had the idea this would bring us to the promised land. It was more convenient than a ribbon type writer for sure but surely not the be-all-end-all. Less work? Ha! Anyone who believed that must surely have been drunk. And anyone believing we would have more free time surely was dillusional. Instant access was even more of a brain fart seeing that a modem did little more than 9600 baud at one time (the maximum guaranteed speed by most telcos at the time). It took ages to download anything, if it was available to begin with. And if you ever heard "Never gonna give you up/ Never gonna let you down/ Never gonna run around/ Or desert you/..." with it's snazzy electro beat, you must surely have wondered whether computer induced music was such great thing. Not to mention the lunacy called fractal art.
 
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