A slight respite from assignment deadlines coincides with catching up on some reading, and these intersect with some thoughts I have been mulling. Reading Anthony Grafton's Future Reading (New Yorker Magazine, 11/5/2007) it clicked.
The half life of an information technology is the interval between successive media proliferations.
It sounds tautologous... but ponder a bit. I will throw out a few pearls now, and return with more in my next post.
What may be different in this regime change, with digital trying to replace paper records, is that print is still proliferating steadily. (Previously, paper rather deftly displaced parchment, which in turn was seen as better than a wax codex, which in pre-Christian days displaced clay tablets...)
Technology 'this time' allows for the production of either printed or digital records from virtually identical workflows, but once they are created, the stewardship, permanence, accessibility and findability of 'hard copy' records, and their 'born digital' siblings, are very different, in ways we are only starting to appreciate.
At the micro-level of digital storage media, we note, in a dizzying short span, the introduction, brief flourish, then complete obsolescence of: 5.25" diskettes, 3.5" floppies (including the uniquely formatted Apple version), ZIP discs (in 100, 250 and ultimately 750MB capacities), Jazz drives, and a host of tape cassette formats. The rewritable CD seems outright venerable, for having been available all of 12 years now, but one wonders how long 'til it is hard to find an optical media drive that won't have the requisite backward compatibility to read all of my carefully archived treasures...
At the macro level, the digital pile will only grow, if not ever fully take over. The incessant need to migrate digitalia to the next darling format on the next hegemonous medium is certain to effectively leave behind much of our societal record and output from this transition era. God knows my archived e-mails, on scores of lovingly labeled and stored media, are not going to be accessible and readable in ten years if I do not decide to commit to periodic conversions and rewritings, and if my original organizing and labeling schemes prove fugitive through it all.
Previous information tech revolutions were relatively swift, and once most of society heard the new tune, they shifted right to it. The important works, with some sad exceptions, made the migration to the next medium. The present revolution does not hold any promise of an early armistice. Think of protracted trench warfare, of waste, and squandered youth, truth and beauty.
1 comment:
Bad news! CD's delaminate. They will not last 100 years (although you can buy specially made CD's that are said to last 100 years -- I bought some for storing family photos). Of course, finding the hardware to read the disk in 100 years may become an issue.
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