Comments | richardf8: A Material Boy in an Ephemeral World

richardf8

A Material Boy in an Ephemeral World

Mar 08, 2004 15:28

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 ( Read more... )

cultural criticism, computers

Comments 8

(The comment has been removed)

richardf8 March 8 2004, 14:22:09 UTC

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 March 8 2004, 14:46:05 UTC

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 March 8 2004, 19:26:53 UTC

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 March 8 2004, 17:04:45 UTC

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 on paper without removing the trail-structure and so losing some of its nature. And most of Jason Farley's 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 March 8 2004, 17:39:25 UTC

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 March 9 2004, 19:15:06 UTC

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 March 10 2004, 19:10:19 UTC

What is intangible isn't necessarily ephemeral ( ... )

richardf8 March 10 2004, 20:17:45 UTC

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 ( ... )