elljayvee:

longseasons:

when I was in college in the 1990s I took a document design course and we had to go talk to an archivist at the university library

the library had a single page from a gutenberg bible (the bible had been damaged by fire and the remaining undamaged pieces cut apart and sold) and a CD sitting next to each other

we looked at the bible page, marveling at this 500+ year old page with its neatly set type, carefully kept under a sheet of glass to protect it

and then she held up the CD and pointed out that in 500 years, if a CD could even last that long, it was unlikely we’d possess the technology to read it

and we all got very quiet and look at the book page for a long time

and is evidenced by the fact I’m telling you about this almost 30 years later, I have never forgotten that blank-looking shiny piece of plastic sitting next to a beautiful, ancient piece of paper that someone pressed words into with a machine and left for me to read, hundreds of years before I was born.

So true. So poetic, so heartbreaking (to think of how much is being lost by not caring about this)

an interesting thought that occurred to me while thinking about the differences between the CD and the printed page:

in both cases, how useful they are as archive material depends largely on whether we will have the capacity to read them in the future

but for the CD, this capacity will have to include the existence of certain machinery, and the knowledge of how to use it

and for the printed page, it only needs to include human sight, literacy and reading comprehension (with some history and linguistics knowledge as well)

this is, unfortunately, also not a perfectly preservable part of the archive effort.

a page from a Gutenberg bible is a very fitting example, because in the present day we are very aware of the effects of how little of the Bible people can actually understand in its original context.

some parts nobody still has the context to interpret at all–we can only guess.

and with other parts historians are fairly confident they know what was meant– but the masses of regular people basing their decisions on the Bible would still rather go with their own gut feelings, or what their parents or their pastor told them.

the more written material is preserved, of course, the more people can understand any of it. But the prevalence of understanding (as opposed to misinterpretation) is dependent on people actually taking the trouble to read, a lot.

Which, yes, is more likely when we have printed paper to archive. (Data saved on a CD or other digital format still won’t be as sure a thing, because it needs both human comprehension and mechanical decoding means.)

but I still fear the loss of the human comprehension part of things.

honestly? the only part of the present-day world that actually gives me hope, about the possibility that humans can retain the capacity to read a multi-paragraph text and actually pay attention and remember and understand most of it?

Is Tumblr.

We mock this site’s reading comprehension. And I know why– I, too, have seen the small percentage of people who will show up with horribly bad takes on any sufficiently popular post.

But everyplace else– from Reddit to my boss’s email inbox– is SO much worse.