A Material Boy in an Ephemeral World
Mar. 8th, 2004 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
richardf8Thank 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.
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.
