This. This is why I worry about criminal cases becoming completely digitized. We are able to work on a decade-old death penalty case because we have boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. What happens when we need to revisit a decade-old case a decade from now? Will our computers still be able to read the files? What about file corruption
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Yes, we don't need it all. But it used to take a willful act to destroy paper information (trash it, burn it, haul it to the dump) where now it takes a series of willful, deliberate acts (scan it, transfer it to new storage devices as the old become obsolete, update the file formats when those become obsolete) to preserve information. The default action, in our digital era, is to lose it.
But they're taking up space. I haven't done anything with any of them in over 12 years. I'm not going into a dark room again - I've got too many chronic conditions to want to expose myself to those chemicals again.
I also fear for the future of all digital, all the time reading, especially when it comes to those old ideas. As a scientist, those old ideas, no matter how wrong or simply unfashionable they turn out to be, are really important. We have to build on what came before, stepwise in so many things. Knowing what didn't work saves a lot of time and that's vital when the questions are critical. I have a small collection of biology textbooks from about 1920 onward, and seeing the ideas, the commonly accepted theories of the different times, is not only fascinating but instructive. In the digital world, who gets to decide what survives, what is worth passing on even though it's not "right" anymore? Me, I'm keeping my old books. All of them. I may eventually be the only person who has a real copy of something we really wish we could go back and read again in the light of current understanding.
Yes, exactly! Wrong ideas are worth saving, too, just so we don't risk trodding the same (wrong) paths again in the future. I think that's what I fear most, in losing books: humankind is Hansel and Gretal, leaving breadcrumbs, and technology is the birds eating them, and like fairy tale children, we think we have a path...and we'll be screwed, to finally turn around and realize we don't.
Yes. I think about this in terms of science and art and music. Granted, in the cases of art and music, it's not so much that old or outdated ideas are wrong, but they provide a truly delicious context. When I listen to music that I can hear references to the artist's influences in, it always makes me smile. When I hear an old theme in a newer work, it is a bit of a delight if the new work is also beautiful.
On the scientific front, I think about the possibility of it being 100 years from now, after the zombie apocalypse, and someone suddenly coming up with the idea of Lamarckian inheritance as though it's a new idea and cringe. We've already been there, done that, but if no knowledge of that survives, how thrilled would some people be to pursue it again? I think about work that is currently being done that is terribly important, but not particularly well publicized or published, and the idea of it just vanishing is horrible.
Benoit Mandelbrot (ie: the guy that discovered the rules of fractal geometry) learned how to do calculus and algebra in his head from an antiquated 1850's math textbook in his childhood home, which taught how to use geometry to perform calculus functions. Although this *style* of math was absolutely correct, it went out of favor before the civil war and has never come back into popularity
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Yeah, I think to "kids these days" CDs are already obsolete. Cd drives aren't even standard on new laptops...and I've been to shows where they don't sell CDs at the merch table, but rather just tell you where you can download the album.
Vinyl will endure, though...hipsters are helping to save that analog medium.
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On the scientific front, I think about the possibility of it being 100 years from now, after the zombie apocalypse, and someone suddenly coming up with the idea of Lamarckian inheritance as though it's a new idea and cringe. We've already been there, done that, but if no knowledge of that survives, how thrilled would some people be to pursue it again? I think about work that is currently being done that is terribly important, but not particularly well publicized or published, and the idea of it just vanishing is horrible.
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Vinyl will endure, though...hipsters are helping to save that analog medium.
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I love you, lady
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