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Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com)
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
That's why we have to support the Internet Archive library. Let's have a backup of everything there !! https://archive.org/
I've discussed this many times before. The loss is a much nearer term than thousands of years, too.
In the not so distant past, when Grandma passed on, the family went through and maintained all sorts of memorabilia. Pictures, letters, deeds, records/tapes/CDs, and other papers. Now, it's all digital. Facebook and possibly an external USB drive full of pictures that no one will ever know is there or find, music collections on laptops or iPods. All these things, and the records that they hold will wind up lost or in the trash and the information is lost forever.
Thanks to the digital age, the vast majority of people on this Earth will leave far less of a mark than the tiny feint scratches left by those before them. Sure, 'data live on forever' and records might exists somewhere, but data doesn't last unless someone is maintaining it and even then, it doesn;t mean that anyone will know the data is there or where to find it.
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
We're all proud of you, cunt lips.
There is nothing in copyright law that prevents the act of duplication or digitization for the creation of a backup copy. On the contrary, there is plenty of precedent on the books to affirm that this is OK and generally falls under "Fair Use." Copyright comes into play if the holding institution wishes to make items publicly available without the copyright owner's permission (hence your last sentence, which may be quote correct). Much more often, it is lack of funds to pay for the digitization or duplication effort and / or lack of required expertise that causes content to be lost in the situation you are describing.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of clay tablet is there was no autostart videos on them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
we switched to modern media not because it lasts longer. It's more reliable because it's more easily copied/produced. You never had the option to use stone tablets for current knowledge -- there's too much knowledge now.
I grew up with my mother suggesting something very interesting: in 1925, if archeologists had dug up a microchip, would they have known what it was? Or just thought it was junk, or a toy, and moved on?
If we want to "document" knowledge, in an ever-lasting way, it's the same game as it's always been: you can't do it with language at all. Sorry. Language doesn't survive. Cave wall drawings are meaningless. Hieroglyphics are useless without culture. Dialects, subtleties, and context are required to interpret language. "bread crumbs" means nothing without a house made of gingerbread.
So how do we "document" knowledge? That's easy: reference objects. For example, the knowledge of how to build a telescope is best "documented" by building a telescope specifically for future generations to study -- maybe bigger, maybe with more obvious design decisions, maybe with more understandable materials, maybe with easily disassembling parts.
Reference builds. I'll say it now. Distant generations learn from objects, not from documentation. We dig up old pottery, and understand what sorts of tools were used. We don't dig up blueprints for pots. Take a reference telescope, and study it for a week. You'll learn everything you need to know about how it works, how it's used, what it can do.
Objects.
Academics are, well, merely academic. We've lost the concept of learning from observation. Remember grade-9 science's how-to-read-a-fish? Most of my friends can't read their own dog.
Effectively everything after 1921 has some kind of copyright complication with it complicating access and long term archiving. Since corporations can own stuff that ownership can go on forever. Even the Happy Birthday song is owned and nobody puts it in film or video as a result. I'm happy that google is winning the court cases its fighting to get copyrighted material on line, but its sad that it takes one corporation to take on other corporations to win.
And a few hundred years later Christians committed xenocide in the Americas, subjugated Africa, Indian Subcontinent, forced drugs on China.
People suck. The difference is though, Muslim nations allowed freedom of religion long before Western nations even knew what that meant. Sure, the West leads on that front now, and many Islamic nations are far from free or tolerant. However, in the time frame that you are attacking them, the middle ages, they WERE the most enlightened people on the planet.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Physical analog media are not covered by the DMCA and do not have any DRM. It's generally a good idea to actually read what you're replying to.