Fahrenheit 1.0
"Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."--NYT
One more step toward the dream of a realtime RSS feed of all human knowledge plugged directly into your brain. Or perhaps toward the end of civilization?
What Google is setting up is similar to existing archives like J-Stor and Lexis Nexis in that it digitally reproduces and stores resources like newspaper and journal articles that also exist as hard copy. And that's cool. What freaks me out is movement toward content that only exists digitally. Steps like the one Google is taking grow the culture of online-only research, journalism, and correspondence, and make a future of digital-only information more and more likely.
Why is this a problem? I am primarily concerned about the possible impact of this culture on future historical study. Personal correspondence, newspaper articles, opinion pieces (the Federalist Papers, for example), and other such documents have always been important resources for biographers and historians. Now these documents are increasingly available only on the internet or as computer files like e-mails. And digitally stored documents may be far less accessible to future historians than physical documents are, in that they are easier to destroy and require special equipment to read their contents.
Your grandfather's letters to your grandmother from WWII? Safe in your attic. Your friend's e-mails to his family from Iraq? Tragically erased when Outlook crashed ($%#*ing Microsoft). And while anyone who knows English will probably be able to read your grandfather's letters now, a hundred, or two hundred years from now simply by picking them up, future historians will hardly be able to "run across" your friend's e-mails, trapped as they are as 1's and 0's on a hard drive, and read them without special effort.
Just something to ponder while you go check your e-mail and then read Slate.
One more step toward the dream of a realtime RSS feed of all human knowledge plugged directly into your brain. Or perhaps toward the end of civilization?
What Google is setting up is similar to existing archives like J-Stor and Lexis Nexis in that it digitally reproduces and stores resources like newspaper and journal articles that also exist as hard copy. And that's cool. What freaks me out is movement toward content that only exists digitally. Steps like the one Google is taking grow the culture of online-only research, journalism, and correspondence, and make a future of digital-only information more and more likely.
Why is this a problem? I am primarily concerned about the possible impact of this culture on future historical study. Personal correspondence, newspaper articles, opinion pieces (the Federalist Papers, for example), and other such documents have always been important resources for biographers and historians. Now these documents are increasingly available only on the internet or as computer files like e-mails. And digitally stored documents may be far less accessible to future historians than physical documents are, in that they are easier to destroy and require special equipment to read their contents.
Your grandfather's letters to your grandmother from WWII? Safe in your attic. Your friend's e-mails to his family from Iraq? Tragically erased when Outlook crashed ($%#*ing Microsoft). And while anyone who knows English will probably be able to read your grandfather's letters now, a hundred, or two hundred years from now simply by picking them up, future historians will hardly be able to "run across" your friend's e-mails, trapped as they are as 1's and 0's on a hard drive, and read them without special effort.
Just something to ponder while you go check your e-mail and then read Slate.
posted by Waage on Sunday, December 19, 2004
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