There was a recent diary where the diarist was upset because they couldn't access a law text that had been scanned in and put online and it got me to thinking about a recurring nightmare I have. Admittedly, it's a worst-case scenario, but it could happen on a smaller scale and the effects could be devastating and long-lasting.
I have been around computers and the digitization of society for a long time. I am the first person to tell you how wonderful the internet and electronics are. My first computer was an Apple ][+ which I inherited from my brother around 1985 when my father bought him an Apple IIe. A few years later, I got a modem and began exploring local internet bulletin boards, interacting with people there.
When I was a little older, I started using the internet via my father's account at the university where he taught. This was 1990, before the World-Wide Web existed and everything was still being done via all-text terminals or terminal style software. When I saw early demonstrations of Mosaic in 1993, I thought it was silly. Little did I know that one day, the reason for the silly little program that was supposed to be better than my beloved Gopher would be the chief reason the internet exists at all.
Today, Google has a program where they are trying to scan in every piece of literature on the planet including periodicals, a noble effort, saving countless volumes which might otherwise be destroyed.
The Library of Congress, among other groups, is doing a lot of digital conservation work of films and sound recordings which are otherwise being lost.
Now, with the advent of electronic ink, you have devices like the Amazon Kindle which give you an experience very close to reading a normal book. I myself own a Sony Reader which has seen a fair amount of use and while a lot of people still prefer old fashioned books and the technology is just not there yet for a digital replacement, it is coming and it could be here sooner than you think.
But this is what scares me and this is where it becomes a little nightmarish- we are entrusting all of our data to computers now. The book will never likely become obsolete, but more and more new information is becoming almost exclusively distributed electronically- people are uploading all of their photos to flickr, newspapers are closing down their print versions but keep themselves alive as websites and more and more people buy all of their music and movies directly online. We are actually living in the most documented time in human history, but more and more of that documentation is being saved as bits of electronic data and not as hard copy.
Meanwhile, libraries around the world have already begun closing. People aren't using them and the funding isn't there. After all, why use a library when you can download all of your entertainment from books to videos? Businesses and governments switch to paperless offices where every idea is saved to hard drives, every process put into digital, non-printed form.
So... here is my nightmare: What happens if that entrusted data suddenly becomes unreadable? Let's face it, technology gets lost. It's happened before. The Romans had all sorts of technological advances from central heating to cataract operations which were lost for centuries in the middle ages, but there was one thing to save it all- the printed page.
Even though much of the technology was lost, much of what was written down was saved with paper copies, some of which you can still read today thousands of years later without the aid of energy or batteries.
So let's look to some future time... maybe the climate has gotten really bad or maybe there's a major war, who knows? Many things could very easily collapse society to the point that we no longer have working electricity to run our computers and get our data. Let us hope that if that happens, the local libraries will have stayed open and there will be books in them to tell us how to rebuild... because at the stage we're going right now, we're going to be screwed.
I hope I showed via my introduction that I am no luddite. I love the fact that technology has enabled to me to read, see and hear things so easily. I'm just worried that very soon, maybe within my lifetime, new books and newspapers will (outside of a niche market) stop being printed. I'm not suggesting all books will go away completely. There will always be people who will love and treasure books, but there will also always be people who love and treasure old-fashioned photography and that is already being abandoned for purely digital media. Unless something very drastic happens, eventually, there will only be a small niche market for non-digital photography, something only a few hobbyists care about. I'm talking about basic information in the form of new books about new discoveries. That is what I fear we are on the brink of losing.
And the problem is, if we lose it for long enough, we will lose it forever. Those hard drives will not sit around waiting for someone to plug the computers back in for hundreds of years and it could take that long to recover. In the end, we could be leaving our descendants with nothing to help them because we didn't bother to put it on paper.
This is what scares me. Does it scare you?