For starters, digital content is only good if its accessible. A book or
scroll can last hundreds of centuries in the right conditions. Printed
text doesn’t require energy to store and regenerate. A book’s format is
timeless, requiring only the physical turning of a page to access its
contents. A digital file - like this column sent to the Sunday Island’s
Editor, a PDF or a spreadsheet - requires energy to be stored, and
propriety technology to open. Think of WordPerfect, dBase III Plus or
VisiCalc. All of these programmes were - just two or three decades ago -
very common and widely used. Today, it’s a technical challenge to
access any file created by them for two reasons. One, the magnetic
media they were stored on. Old floppy disks, especially in the tropics,
would have long given up a fight against fungi, humidity and insects.
Two, the file formats are defunct and require significant effort and
technical expertise to open in modern day computers and programmes. No
digital file format or medium used today is immune from this same
decay, decades hence.
http://bit.ly/2GPNRdXhttp://bit.ly/2GPNRdX+--
Peterk
Dallas, Tx
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“If only there were a massive entity that I were forced to fund to tell
me how I should live my life, since I’m so obviously incapable of
deciding for myself.” M. Hashimoto
