Written Communication - Part II

Previously, I wrote about the importance of writing because, among other things, it allows us to learn from the past.  The great thing about learning from the past is that it allows you to escape from having to learn everything by experience (i.e. the hard way).  I’ve decided that, at least in my life, I prefer to maximize the number of things I learn the easy way (by listening to or reading about others)!

My thought for today is about the somewhat precarious nature of our written record in the 21^st century and beyond.  I might be off-base, but here it goes.  I wonder if our written record might get lost over time.  Specifically, I am talking about the written record of the world that increasingly exists only in an electronic form.  We are encouraged to go paperless in many things, which is great for trees, but maybe not for posterity.  I am one of the last people to adopt new technologies or new ways of doing things, but even in my own life I find that much of what I do and write only exists in an electronic form.  For example, the text in this blog only exists electronically.  Ideas encoded in electrons are hardly the most enduring method of recording history.

Let me give you an example from my own life.  When I wrote my dissertation back in 1991, I wrote it on a “word processor” – I think it was on a DEC Rainbow computer.  It was one of the first things I wrote that was not written entirely on paper and then typed up at the end.  The file for that document was stored on the hard drive of that computer and backed up on a 3.5” floppy disk.  That hard drive is loooong gone, and if I still have the floppy disk (which I doubt), I’d have a hard time finding an old floppy drive that still works so that I could read it.  But, that doesn’t really matter that much, because there are printed hardcopies that still exist of my dissertation – for example there is a copy in the basement of the Kelvin Smith library at CWRU (unless someone checked it out!).  Also, I have a printed copy as well.  But what I find happening more and more is that, even with a student’s dissertation, I am sent an electronic copy after their defense, and not a hardcopy.  I don’t know if a hardcopy exists in the library anymore of the more recent dissertations.  Certainly, it is not unreasonable to think that at some point in the future, people will never print out a copy of their dissertation – it will only exist in electronic versions.  So, I just wonder – how enduring is that?  If I don’t take the time to copy all of my past work onto my next computer and save it to the latest media, eventually it will all probably be lost.  If I store it on the internet, then who knows where it is or how durable that record is.  If Google disappears tomorrow – something I have no control over – then I’m pretty sure all the content of this blog disappears with it.  That’s probably not a great loss!  The point is not about my meaningless drivel – the point is about important documents related to knowledge and history.  For example, is it reasonable to think that there might come a time where scientific journals are never actually published in any physical form, but only published electronically?  I think that time has come already for some journals.  If the journal’s servers and backups go down, what is left of that record?

It’s probably all fine until there is some much larger disaster.  What if someone develops the equivalent of an atomic bomb, but is directed towards electronic storage and communication?  That’s surely a “humane” way to destroy a whole country.  The point is, if all of our electronic information was suddenly wiped out and permanently unavailable to us, what history would we have left?  It seems to me that the loss of knowledge could be much bigger than what was lost by the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.  The complete loss of the electronic record is probably not a huge loss right now, in 2015, but what about 50 or 100 years from now when our reliance on electronic storage must surely be complete.  Will there even be libraries with hardcopies of books?

So, I will leave you with this thought.  Maybe someday, after the human race has been wiped out, someone will come upon earth and seek to uncover the history of man.  They will find a few bits of well-preserved hieroglyphics carved in stone, some broken bits of pottery with writing inscribed on it, maybe a chance bit of papyrus and some random stacks of old books.  But they will notice that the history of man seems to end around 2000 AD and they might wonder – what ever happened to them all?  They built all sorts of machines and buildings after that time, but they seemed to have stopped recording their own history!!