Evanescence

Evanescence
2013-05-08
     This evening, we watched a documentary about Yousuf Karsh, portrait photographer. Towards the end, the curator of his estate mentioned that printing his negatives is becoming ever more difficult, because there is less and less paper and chemistry being produced. A historian wondered how much of the mass of digital images being made would be available for historians 20, 30, 100 years from now. He didn’t answer, but we can surmise it will be a very small, and randomly biased, sample. There were a few shots of people working with digitised imagery.
     I’m digitising my collection of negatives and slides, an interesting, frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking, and often tedious job. Tonight’s session was interrupted by getting the garbage ready for tomorrow: I threw out several of Jon’s floppy diskettes that were no longer readable. I’d used my best utilities to scavenge what I could from them, but most of the data was gone. Jon may have copied some of the data to his hard drives, but it will be almost impossible to tell. He also left some notebooks, most of the notes recording data for games he played, but here and there he wrote poems and bits of prose. These will be digitised, too, but we will keep the paper copies: paper will last longer than floppy disks or hard drives or DVDs.
     All data eventually vanishes. We have records from certain periods of the past only because the bureaucratic mind desires records, hoards facts and data. At one time, most data was created by bureaucrats. Then printing drove a demand for new content, and writers and poets left records of their works in progress, notebooks and diaries and drafts of essays and stories. Now, most content is created by digital media, and most of it is of no more (or less) permanent interest than casual conversation. Very little of this will be kept for any length of time, and even less will ever be examined. Automated data searches will no doubt flag what’s worth keeping, or worth using for whatever nefarious purposes the State has in its bureaucratic mind. But most information has very short-lived value. As it is, the scraps of paper that survive the decades and centuries do so as much by accident as by design. Later generations have different notions of what’s important to know or understand. What we wish to be remembered by may not matter to our descendants.
     Evanescence is the fate of all information. Electronic information will vanish more quickly than anything our ancestors produced: information that requires electricity to be read is doomed to obsolescence. Only an obsessive regimen of repeated conversion to new media will preserve it for more than a decade or two. For ourselves, we can at best hope for being recorded in some living memories and some randomly surviving hard copies of photographs or text, and perhaps a few artifacts that mattered to us, or that we created.