You are describing a broader trend in what could be called clutter reduction. I am a retired engineer. While downsizing recently I was sorting through a box of old letters from the seventies and eighties with the object of selecting some to pass on to my daughter. I have a much older set passed on to me by my father, including a number of handwritten letters from the 1890s from his grandfather. It occurred to me: I wonder if my daughter will have any such letters of her own to pass on to her children? I wondered if she had ever even received even a single physical handwritten letter? They no longer even teach handwriting in schools.
The deluge of digital media seems to be doing two things: the "deluge" part has made every single person a photographer with a portfolio of tens of thousands of photos (and now movies). Storage is so cheap that we don't ever cull them. So what builds up is an ocean of mediocrity and banality that no one has the time to swim through looking for what is special. What valuable "signals" undoubtedly exist within are buried in "noise".
The "digital" part is tricky. Formats keep changing. How many of you have run into the problem of being unable to view/play the older archives? Digital discs or tapes that no longer work? Players no one has anymore? Corrupted media? I can still play every single one of my vinyl records. But I am finding an increasing number of my CDs won't play. Copy them onto hardrives and into the cloud, you say. Then there are those inevitable hard drive crashes, cloud failures, account terminations, backup failures, accidental deletions of entire corpuses of imagery, email archives that for weird reasons are unrecoverable and suddenly one realizes it's all gone forever. Like it never existed.
Archeology talks about how little we know about the lives of early people who didn't leave durable artifacts. Are we creating a modern "dark age" of which little can be known or said in a thousand years time? They will call it the plastic age.Thats durable. But who were these people?
I have no physical photographs from the last ten years. OTOH I keep moving my old photo albums, and my mother still has the old family photo albums, and I don't know where those will end up eventually as I don't have children. Other than holiday cards I haven't received letters in decades.
I would love to find an old Feed magazine (online publication) interview with Jean Stein in which she said something like "there's a certain type of girl who becomes obsessed with the book Edie" and mentioned that it was Courtney Love's favorite book, but alas, there are no online archives for Feed. So there is a perfect example of what you are talking about!
Where should your photo albums and hand-written letters go? Your Local Archive might want them? Perhaps future humans will judge our "Plastic" age by the increasingly rare independent print and other analog media, especially vinyl. The enthusiasts (and Libraries and Archives) collecting zines and ephemera will be the voice of the 'Late 20th and early 21st century'. What we keep and what we discard will define us for future generations. So instead of selecting for what you want your Daughter to know of you, choose what you want someone in 2122 to know of you, if anything. Most humans for most of history are now completely anonymous to us. This ought to be a liberating idea, but it also means is that the lessons we ought to learn from the recent past will be lost to all of us. Mistakes we are already repeating thanks to the "Right side of History" hubris created by tech echo chambers that equate a difference of opinion with bigotry. A 'De-cluttered' version of history is what we are currently trying to unlearn; at the same time, there is an alarming trend for 'Activist' library workers to 'de-select' the voices and ideas that might expose them to a content challenge. Truly revolutionary voices from the last 50 years are being erased in ways that may mean they are lost forever. Our memory institutions cannot keep up with the cost of maintaining access to constantly changing tech. The Internet Archive can only do so much. I relish the notion that, much like the sacred shopping list of A Canticle for Leibowitz, future historians will view us through the miraculously intact personal print library of a Star Trek obsessed hermit living in a remote wilderness. The superstars of the moment will be long forgotten.
You are describing a broader trend in what could be called clutter reduction. I am a retired engineer. While downsizing recently I was sorting through a box of old letters from the seventies and eighties with the object of selecting some to pass on to my daughter. I have a much older set passed on to me by my father, including a number of handwritten letters from the 1890s from his grandfather. It occurred to me: I wonder if my daughter will have any such letters of her own to pass on to her children? I wondered if she had ever even received even a single physical handwritten letter? They no longer even teach handwriting in schools.
The deluge of digital media seems to be doing two things: the "deluge" part has made every single person a photographer with a portfolio of tens of thousands of photos (and now movies). Storage is so cheap that we don't ever cull them. So what builds up is an ocean of mediocrity and banality that no one has the time to swim through looking for what is special. What valuable "signals" undoubtedly exist within are buried in "noise".
The "digital" part is tricky. Formats keep changing. How many of you have run into the problem of being unable to view/play the older archives? Digital discs or tapes that no longer work? Players no one has anymore? Corrupted media? I can still play every single one of my vinyl records. But I am finding an increasing number of my CDs won't play. Copy them onto hardrives and into the cloud, you say. Then there are those inevitable hard drive crashes, cloud failures, account terminations, backup failures, accidental deletions of entire corpuses of imagery, email archives that for weird reasons are unrecoverable and suddenly one realizes it's all gone forever. Like it never existed.
Archeology talks about how little we know about the lives of early people who didn't leave durable artifacts. Are we creating a modern "dark age" of which little can be known or said in a thousand years time? They will call it the plastic age.Thats durable. But who were these people?
I have no physical photographs from the last ten years. OTOH I keep moving my old photo albums, and my mother still has the old family photo albums, and I don't know where those will end up eventually as I don't have children. Other than holiday cards I haven't received letters in decades.
I would love to find an old Feed magazine (online publication) interview with Jean Stein in which she said something like "there's a certain type of girl who becomes obsessed with the book Edie" and mentioned that it was Courtney Love's favorite book, but alas, there are no online archives for Feed. So there is a perfect example of what you are talking about!
Where should your photo albums and hand-written letters go? Your Local Archive might want them? Perhaps future humans will judge our "Plastic" age by the increasingly rare independent print and other analog media, especially vinyl. The enthusiasts (and Libraries and Archives) collecting zines and ephemera will be the voice of the 'Late 20th and early 21st century'. What we keep and what we discard will define us for future generations. So instead of selecting for what you want your Daughter to know of you, choose what you want someone in 2122 to know of you, if anything. Most humans for most of history are now completely anonymous to us. This ought to be a liberating idea, but it also means is that the lessons we ought to learn from the recent past will be lost to all of us. Mistakes we are already repeating thanks to the "Right side of History" hubris created by tech echo chambers that equate a difference of opinion with bigotry. A 'De-cluttered' version of history is what we are currently trying to unlearn; at the same time, there is an alarming trend for 'Activist' library workers to 'de-select' the voices and ideas that might expose them to a content challenge. Truly revolutionary voices from the last 50 years are being erased in ways that may mean they are lost forever. Our memory institutions cannot keep up with the cost of maintaining access to constantly changing tech. The Internet Archive can only do so much. I relish the notion that, much like the sacred shopping list of A Canticle for Leibowitz, future historians will view us through the miraculously intact personal print library of a Star Trek obsessed hermit living in a remote wilderness. The superstars of the moment will be long forgotten.
To your point, I looked up Feed Magazine on the Wayback Machine but what was available was very limited.