1 Feb
2009
1 Feb
'09
8:43 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
Why do I get this feeling that we're writing our
history in
quicksand?
Letters the young Mozart exchanged with his sister are still extant
to give us a unique peek into the composer's mind. Will we have the
emails of a modern Mozart to similarly peruse in the future?
Well, lots of ancient paper documents are unearthed damaged or even outright
"erased and reused". The following's a good read if you're into that
kind of
thing:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimed…
I suspect that techniques to recover data from modern media will evolve over
the years just as they have for paper. Sure, lots of data will be lost - but
I'm not sure that's really so much different to paper archives; the amount of
data from the "old days" which has outright gone must be staggering in
relation to what has survived and is known about.
We already have the phenomeon of mainstream media
"correcting" their
online content leaving no trace of error behind. No more "Dewey
beats Truman" headlines...
That's the real issue, I think - not the storage mechanism that's used, but
our desire to constantly rewrite history. A few hundred years from now it'll
be hard to know "the truth" because there'll be so many conflicting
opinions
and different versions of events recorded.
cheers
Jules