| Photography Forum: Philosophy Of Photography Forum: |
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Q. Will the past still be there later?
Asked by bill zelinski
(K=609) on 10/26/2000
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With the pending sale of usenet (Wired article) I was curious about where all this wonderful digital "history" will go? While we all debate the technology of how digital images will be created, how or where will all this digital wonderfulness be kept for the coming generations? Or will it? How many people keep thier email like they used to keep letters? Historians are already concerned that a valuable resource for learning about the our past is being lost, what of photographic images when its so easy to hit delete. One of photographys biggest treasures for most people is their shoebox of old photos, somehow I dont see this box going digital but if it does what would it look like? What now happens to the "solidity" of the past if we (and others) can recompose,remove and distort it so easily? There's a terrific BBC movie called "Shooting the Past" that looks at some of these ideas. What do think?
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Nick Barry
(K=30) - Comment Date 10/26/2000
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First off... Usenet isn't being sold. Deja.com is. And Deja.com only has five years worth of Usenet posts - at lot of which are useless since spam has become so rampant in that time. Usenet has been around since the early to mid 80s. Nobody archived it until deja.com did it starting in '95. It's a handy resource, but one that isn't very useful for me since wading through spam to get a decent, informational post takes forever. With that said, I recognize that isn't the thrust of your question.
I don't know as if your question of discarding is too much of a concern. What if I ask your question in another light: "What of photographic images when its (sic) so easy to toss a package of them in the trash?" I think that yes, it might be very easy to delete images on a hard disk. But then again, a typical paper envelope that I get from the lab is also easy to toss - along with the negs. I also think that saving to a more permanent digital medium also mitigates this. How likely are you to toss a CD-R that has "Keeper Photos" written on the disk? I know I'd take a look at what's inside - just as I would a photo album with the same title.
What's more, digital manipulation is just the latest in a long line of manipulations of images by simple airbrushing and darkroom tricks - it's just a bit easier now. Words are no different. After all, Ford invented the automobile, right (ask 10 15-20 year olds and they might not even think Ford did it)? I don't think that history is being lost at any greater rate than it has in the past. But with more of us (humans) to generate it, the loss (or generation) of history may be greater in sheer number, but not in rate per person. I think it's just slightly alarmist of historians to state this. But that's just one fellow's opinion (mine) and I've yet to see "Shooting the Past". I'll have to look for it.
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Brian C. Miller
(K=390) - Comment Date 10/26/2000
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Do we keep our phone conversations? How many of us keep the messages left on our answering machine? Our society isn't a bunch of letter writers any longer, either. We just phone someone up and have a chat.
Only hard copy is kept around, and only real archival hard copy lasts. One of the problems the Library of Congress faces is how to keep our current generation of books from decaying. The books of the 19th century were made with better paper. The books of this century have mostly been made with a very cheap paper which decays quickly.
I expect that there will be even less archived digital information. What is the lifespan of a CD? What is the lifespan of a recordable CD-ROM? How long do magnetic tapes last?
None of this stuff is made for extremely long-term storage.
But then again, a lot of it is just transient fluff. So it decays. Everything we create decays. That's life.
Come to think of it, popular use of photography is really recent. When did George Eastman start selling the original disposable camera? 1888. "You push the button, we do the rest." Before that, the common person did not have ready access to memorable images. You had to be an artist of some kind or commision art. So we don't have very many everyday images, at least not in comparison to this age of photography.
History is malleable anyways. If you are reading a history book, someone has already gone through and edited what goes in and what stays out. Unless you've lived through it, you really never know exactly what happened. There's a new book of what happened on the Titanic that's been published. There is new information, and old information is updated and corrected. So history "changes."
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Mike Dixon
(K=1387) - Comment Date 10/26/2000
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I agree that history has never been very "solid." We just have new ways of manipulating things now.
I do think that digital images are at more risk of being inadvertently lost than paper and plastic photos and negatives. Or rather, we are much more likely to lose the ability to readily access those images. That CD-R may be intact 20 years from now, but what will you read it with? Twenty years ago, 8-inch floppy disks were a common way of storing and retrieving data on PCs. I haven't even seen a 8-inch floppy drive in over 15 years. CD-ROMs have only been mass market devices for about six years; current DVDs can still read those "old" disks, but do you think the mass storage devices five years from now will still be backwards compatible?
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Brian
(K=351) - Comment Date 10/27/2000
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If something is worth keeping it will be kept. However, we all share responsibility to preserve the past. If you want a particular letter, message, image, whatever to continue to exist, don't rely on "them" to do it. Print things out, archive them, hand them down to your children.
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bill zelinski
(K=609) - Comment Date 10/27/2000
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Who decides what we should keep? "Important" history is not just what "important" people do and what the offical historians say it is. Can we look into the future far enough to decide what should be saved now? I have my doubts. If I may be paranoid for a moment, isn't the ability to erase and rewrite the past one of the favored tools of a totalitarian state? I think eventually talented photographers and artists will work most of these technology issues out, just as has happened in the past, but not without some casualties.
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Conrad Hoffman
(K=287) - Comment Date 10/27/2000
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The B&W photography of our grandparents has hung around longer than most of the color shots our parents took when we were little (I'm 45, so adjust your frame of reference accordingly). Todays color is better, but no way will todays snaps or even B&W RC prints be around in a useful form 100 years from now- unless digitized in an archival manner. The number of images made since the late 1800s increases every second, and I can't see any way that we're ever going to keep but a small fraction. Even if we could, who'd have time to ever see even 1% of any given topic or search term?
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Robert Segal
(K=30) - Comment Date 11/10/2000
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"I have the world's largest sea shell collection. I keep it on beaches all over the planet." -- Steve Martin
Life is like life is, whether or not you elect to gather bits of it. You cannot 'be here' if you spend your 'now' collecting.
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