A Material Boy in an Ephemeral World

[richardf8]

Thank God for Plan9 Publishing. While the good folks at the Gutenberg project are industriously converting printed and manuscript texts to electronic media, making them more accessible, and more readily searchable, Plan9 is doing work that is arguably more important: converting electronic media to print. This is important work because of the inherently ephemeral nature of digitally stored data. The entire reason that Gutenberg can do what it does is that it has source media to work with that are not, by their nature ephemeral. Our cultural predecessors left us permanent records of their philosophy, their literature, even their government. As the ideal of "paperlessness" is extolled, I wonder if we will be able to leave an enduring legacy or if large swaths of our culture will be lost to media obsoloscence. I also wonder how trustworthy even the information we do record is, given the mercurial nature of digital media.

A book, a scroll, a chiseled stone are all artifacts. This is the key distinction between these things and a web page. If I alter my web page, what it was before dies as if it never was. It may know a brief half-life in google's caches, may survive a little bit longer in spaces like the Internet Archiving project, and I will confess to being amazed that when I google my name, one of the items that I get back is a joystick port pinout that I posted to a newsgroup over a decade ago. But we are deluding ourselves if we imagine that these electonic records will survive a complete decay of civilization. Print records, however, have. Many have been lost over the millenia, it is true, but so many have survived that we can put together a reasonable picture of the cultures of Greece and Rome, and even get glimpses of legal customs in cultures older than those.

The other concern raised by ephemeral media is the ease of revision. Information may be excised without leaving a trace behind, an embarassing remark excised from the record without so much as a palimpsest to betray the change. This opens up important questions about knowledge and history. If we rely on the internet to record our history, we should not be surprised when something we remember being said or done is suddenly gone from the record. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of electronic media remains the strongest argument against electronic voting.

This is why I sing the praises of Plan9. They are pioneering the conversion of ephemera to artifact. And I know that in a hundred years, when the web is a barely remembered fin de siecle phenomenon, copies of Regime Change and Gone with The Windows will remain as monuments to the artistry of the information age.

Comments

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. My focus has always been the books for that very reason. They are concrete and real.

The other concern raised by ephemeral media is the ease of revision.

Indeed; even now I can change anything I want about the artwork while it's on the web. But once it's in the books, I feel it's set in stone.

[richardf8]

Yes. And the fact that I can always fix stuff in Paint-Shop Pro means that I am a little too tolerant of errors in draftsmanship in my originals.

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've seen articles expressing dread that future generations will know little of our history. I'm of two minds about paperlessness, since at the current rate it'll be only so much longer we can use paper. I print only when the situation demands, or when I think the text should be preserved in the long run.

[richardf8]

The point you raise is the flip side of the issue: Never has so much paper been wasted as in the era of self publishing. In a typical office it may be minutes or hours from the printer to the recycle bin for a typical print job. The irony is that the resources are expended on data too trivial to preserve, so that what was comitted to paper is then summarily discarded, with the thought that, if needed, another may be printed. I wish your discretion were the rule rather than the exception.

[timtylor.livejournal.com]

There are problems with file formats, too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2207297.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/2143979.stm

On the other hand, Scott "Infinite Canvas" McCloud's right too. Digital media do open a lot of good and worthwhile artistic possibilities, and the comics I know that make use of them are well-worth preserving too. It would be hard to save a comic like Bunny and the Cantelope (http://www.theelusivefish.com/tlt/BunnyandtheCantelope/) on paper without removing the trail-structure and so losing some of its nature. And most of Jason Farley's (http://www.e-sheep.com/) comics would be seriously cut down offscreen. And paper can perish too. Somebody said rats and floods are historians' best friends; they cut down surviving records to manageable quantities.

[morgan1.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if the cultures of the past impress us so because only the stuff that was worth carving in stone, or putting on parchment laboriously made from animal skins, has survived. It kinda scares me that the increasingly easy availability of print media means that people in future millennia may get to read People. And I'm not betting on Survivor getting it's well-deserved oblivion either.

[visservoldemort.livejournal.com]

Consider also that, due to the large amount of realistic sci-fi/thriller books with elaborate and believable histories, that what actually occured may get confused with the latest novel

[mochii-chan.livejournal.com]

What is intangible isn't necessarily ephemeral:

In fact, while the toll of chemical and entropical (is that a word?) decay inherently dooms nondigital media, properly preserved tape drives can save billions in arhiving fees while retaining all of the written information on the paper.
For photographs, this is especially important, since the quality and durability of the image degenerates from the organic stabilizers in film- alternative chemical treatments are prohibitively costly, and fated, anyhoo.

As for the revision problem: hidden behind a pretty interface is an enoromous mesh of archival data. On your HDD right now, is probably every draft of every paper you've ever written, every email sent, or decided not to send... a treasure trove for anyone interested in reading your papers. On a larger scale, this is how to trace the origins of all digital data -- while a tangible paper trail might not be around, a digital one certainly is.

The last time I had to exorcize sensitive information from a friend's computer, we took the HDD outside, and used a hammer, a screwdriver, and at one point, an SUV.

Also, the perils of digital media shouldn't ever be associated with that paper or two on floppy we've all lost at some point; that computerization glitch has a different name: Windows ^^

[richardf8]

The last time I had to exorcize sensitive information from a friend's computer, we took the HDD outside, and used a hammer, a screwdriver, and at one point, an SUV.

This sounds like quite the story. You do know that dipping the platters in hydrofluoric acid would have stripped the emulsion and oxidized it? That's how the super-secret-squirrel agencies dispose of their drives.

As for the forensic trail on a hard drive, it depends on a lot. See Tim Tylor's response above for a discussion of the challenge of decoding digital data where the encoding process is unknown. Doable yes, but not without a lot of effort. As for being able to parse what's under layers of subsequent magnetic charges, I know it's possible, but it is also a very laborious process. That audit trail is also not available on a digital copy of the modified document. The very act of locating which machine on the internet contained the document as it was modified can prove sufficiently daunting to ensure anonymity.

Of course, I'm also ignoring the fact that the same ancients who carved their laws in stone probably scribbled their to do lists in the sand. There's nothing new under the sun. :)