Digitisation of information has been in some ways a great success. I now have information available to me freely and cheaply whereas in the past I would have had to rely on either a public library or incur enormous financial and personal cost in tracking down needed information.
To give a personal example of how digitised information has benefited me, I can now get any Rabbinical opinion on any subject just by using a search engine. In the past I would have had to have either personal contact with a Rabbi knowledgable about what I was interested in or find out through initial research who the expert is and then either possibly travel long distances to physically meet them or engage in a chronologically lengthy postal correspondence with them. When I wanted to know what specific Bracha or blessing I should say when I see the new King after he has been crowned, even if he’s on the television, I was able to get a variety of detailed answers in less than a minute, for the record for those who are interested, it turns out that I’m not obligated to say the blessing for seeing a king if he’s on the TV it’s only when or if I saw him in person, however I’m not forbidden to do so.
But digitisation has a number of big downsides. Chief among them is that digitised information can be edited so that it conforms to whatever is the current fashion whether that fashion be a social or a political one. Tucker Carlson speaking to the Heritage Foundation in the video below points out that the value of physical books is that they cannot be retrospectively edited by those who wish to control narratives. He also said that digitisation has led to a centralisation of information rather than democratising it.
Whatever you might think about Tucker Carlson and I know that he can be a bit of a ‘Marmite’ type character, he’s right about physical books. Hang on to them, don’t throw them away as they are the ‘repository’ of knowledge and can’t be ‘disappeared’ as easily as digitised information can.
You are absolutely 100% correct. The beauty of the printed written word is that it is permanent ( as permanent can be) and the drafts can be read too, along with margin notes and corrections.
It is possible now to create a piece of music, art, design, writing and for it to never exist in any tangible state and to be lost to archaeologists and historians for ever.
What has more value? A first manuscript in the hand of the author or a corrupted 3 1/4″ floppy disc?
When digitisation is done well, as with the London Metropolitan Archive’s project that has digitised some very niche 78rpm discs,it’s a good thing but as well as the problem with information centralisation which Mr Carlson speaks about in the video, there’s also the issue of being able to read old data. It’s very difficult these days to get drives for reading 8″ or 5 1/4″ disks and librarians of the furture could be faced with a problem of having relevant information but not being able to read it.
Very true. I used to work for a London hospital that had loads of old 5 1/42 floppy disks but no way of reading them.
I also think that the current streaming model where there are only a few official copies of a film/tv show could cause problems compared to when individuals has their own large collections of media on disks (might maybe lead to a repeat of situations like the loss of old black and white episodes of Dr Who and the like?)
You point out several big issues here. Re the hospital situation. There might be vital information in these big disks information that might be needed if ever there was some future inquiry into conduct at the hospital or even to document the hospital’s history and because the data had not been copied onto newer formats then that data is effectively lost.
The problem with streaming is that you are at the mercy of the streamers. Even if you ‘buy’ the product online to access it via your streaming service, it’s no guarantee that you will continue to have access to it, a streamer could remove something on a whim or because the blue hairs start screaming about it. I take the view that we should all own physical media as that way we get the product as it was originally made and not the product bowlderised to suit the tastes of easily offended snowflakes.
I can well see a situation where stuff that should be kept ends up getting erased. It might not be the same situation as when the Dr Who’s and such like were wiped in order to reuse the then costly 1″ tape as digital storage is unbelievably cheap compared to what it used to be*, but having all the media product in one place and under one controller makes the likelihood of stuff disappearing because someone accidentally pressed the delete key or some snowflake making complaints much greater than it should be.
*to give you an idea how cheap digital storage has got I’ve just ordered a 256GB USB drive from Ebuyer for £13.50 including postage. One of the first professional Mac computer / design suites I worked in paid £3,000 for a removable cartridge drive that had a capacity of 30 megabyte. It did speed up production as it stopped big files of artwork of 25Mb plus having to be split into 25 to 30 3 and a quarter inch floppies and have them stitched back together again at the printing contractors.
You only have to look at the toxic effect of censorship by ideologically motivated “sensitivity readers” imposing their prejudices on others. What next, removing any references to XX and XY from biology to appease the cult of Trans?
The ‘sensitivity readers’ are ruining literature both old and new. Re doing away with standard and well understood biological terms well the US National Science Teaching Association already seems to be going down that dangerous path https://www.nsta.org/science-teacher/science-teacher-septemberoctober-2021/gender-inclusive-biology-framework-action
I read my first actual physical book last weekend (because I couldn’t get a Kindle version). I couldn’t stop looking at the top of the page to see what the time was!
LOL nice one! We’ve just had to instruct our eight year old in how to work a VCR. It took a lot of explaining to get him to understand that video tapes need to be wound back to the start in order to watch the start of a film and that with VC’s you can’t just hit the back buttons on the remote (the film he wanted to watch we only had on VHS).