Saturday, September 15, 2007
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In George Fifield's class we talked about the the cultural record that we as a predominantly digital culture will leave. Sure, the great thing about digital information is that it, on its own, does not degrade, you can make an infinite number of copies and backup. You can disseminate it to all ends of the earth and every copy is identical to the first. However, by the very nature of technology, it is rapidly and constantly changing, thus unless this infinitely copied data is migrated from one generation of technology to the next, it becomes not only inaccessible, but also invisible. At least with untranslatable ancient records we can see what we can't read, but in 500 years, try knowing about, opening, and reading a Microsoft Word document.
As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).
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As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).
0 Comments Links to this post