I found this interesting. Fans of Metal Gear Solid 2 know that the game comments on the permanence of digital information, portraying traditional culture as fragile and transient, and digital culture as a swelling “flood” of eternally accessible garbage. Physical records conform to the idea of evolution and natural selection, he suggests. But yesterday, respected technology prophet and bestselling author Nicholas Carr flipped this idea on its head by suggesting that it’s actually old, physical culture that remains accessible, and digital information that becomes swept away in a stream of technological change…
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We see Kojima’s commentary on the digital revolution during the argument with the menacing A.I. system named “G.W.”, manifesting as two characters:
Rose: We’ve always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols… from tablets to books…
Colonel: But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really.
Rose: That’s what history is, Jack.
Colonel: But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible.
Rose: Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander…
Colonel: All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.
Rose: It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
But here’s what Mr. Carr says:
Printed books don’t last forever, but, with a modicum of care, they can last a very long time. And as long as a book lasts, it remains readable (assuming the reader knows the language). Because an ebook is not susceptible to the kind of physical decay that can afflict a paper book, it theoretically can last longer. But in this case there is a vast gulf between theory and reality. What we know about computer documents is that, due to rapid changes in computer operating systems, computer media, software applications, and file formats, they don’t tend to have much longevity. I have a box of floppy disks from fifteen or twenty years ago sitting in a closet, and even if I still had a floppy drive (which I don’t) my current computers would be unable to read most of the files on the disks. As software, ebooks will likely suffer from this same impermanence, a problem magnified by the wide range of proprietary and open formats in which ebooks are sold today.
Reading these two views, it seems to me that, whether a piece of culture is physical or digital, it can be equally fragile. As technology continues to shed its skin and revise itself — as websites go offline (remember GeoCities?) or file formats become incompatible with new systems — digital information gets lost in huge quantities, lost in the sands of time. However, should you print a copy of that document, or this web page for instance, you would have something that no amount of technological shifts could corrupt: a permanent copy for yourself. If this site ceased to exist, you’d still have this information. What does that say about digital permanence versus physical?
On the other hand, physical books are printed by the millions, only to collect dust on shelves, decay in landfills, or get recycled back into blank paper. But there are also archives, vacuum-sealed packages, libraries, and even digitization to help preserve the most significant ones. Either way, important things are preserved, and unimportant things are left to the mercy of time, tech, and change.
Read the full Nicholas Carr blog post, “Words in stone and in the wind” here.
See also: The Death of the Cyberflâneur, NYTimes.com