It's the End of the World As We Know It (And There's No Paper to Prove It)

Hey all,

If you were scrolling through Facebook this weekend you might have noticed a series of articles describing what Vint Cerf, a Google vice president, sees as a possible "digital dark age." For your convenience, I've posted a link to one of the articles here: (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389).

Essentially, Cerf argues that technology advancements are moving at an exponential rate, which means we could lose large portions of the 21st century's history (by which he means information that contributes to individual and communal narratives, like family photos). Because digital hardware is always becoming more advanced (and doesn't always allow for backwards compatibility) we risk bits of information whenever we store it on hard drives or cloud-based technology. The solution? Cerf suggests companies preserve software and hardware through a server in the cloud (for a fee, of course).

Obviously the premise of a "digital dark age" (no I didn't make that up) seems a bit ridiculous. Yes, people lose bits and pieces of information whenever they upgrade, but that only really applies to an ability to move information from one platform to another. Think about all those family pictures your mom has spent five years scanning so that she can post them on Facebook. Those pictures now not only occupy physical space (in terms of the pictures themselves and the negatives) but they also exist on two different platforms (on your computer's hard drive and on Facebook's site). So, yes, we are throwing a ton of information into a vacuum. But, save for a complete meltdown, duplicates upon duplicates will always exist somewhere.

Ranting aside, I thought we could continue the conversation we started on Thursday with this piece. If we were to believe Google vice presidents it would seem that Plato was right to fear writing as a mode of communication (what happens when all the paper is gone and nobody has memorized Homer?!). Are we really doomed to lose all information or is this manner of thinking directly related to what Walter Ong argues in The Written Word: Literacy in Translation? Here's another link for your convenience: (http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f08/ong_article.pdf).

Feel free to contribute your thoughts to this conversation. The technology of writing is something I've been thinking about since Jan term, so I'd love to hear other people's opinions on effective information sharing. Consider this passage from Ong:

"As a time-obviating, context-free mechanism, writing separates the known from the knower more definitely than the original orally grounded manoeuvre [sic] of naming does, but it also unites the knower and the known more consciously and more articulately. Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology. So is print, even more, and, in its own way, so is the computer. But that is another story, which has yet to be told or written or printed or processed in the course of this series" (48).

Now, I think, is the perfect time to engage with the story our culture is currently writing, a story chronicled through digital composition.