The Medium Is Not The Message

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The truly unique thing about the written and printed word is its persistence, resilience and resistance to tampering. Unlike the digital domain, which is subject to failure at all of these points. A book or journal can be damaged - by fire, water, insects, fungi or very often just rodents - granted, but text in the digital realm has an especially tenuous, often evanescent existence by comparison to more corporeal forms of storage. The very language of the text itself is actually key to its resilience. Written or printed language is the direct analogue of the spoken word expressed at one, very slight remove, for storage and later retrieval. In more recent history, analogue audio recordings have provided us with a slightly less removed analogue of human communication. The same applies to film and video. But with the digitisation of either text or speech, film or video, we enter a realm of total abstraction where the medium of storage is essentially disconnected from the content being transformed for future retrieval. All well and good in the sense that the cataloguing and indexing of digital data is so much easier than the manual processes of the purely analogue realm.

But whereas writing [and printing in its purest and most direct form] are essentially the same now as in millennia before, and therefore, provided that the texts have been physically preserved and copies made [Gutenberg ensured the relative ease of the latter] still accessible to us; digital data is not necessarily so. Data formats and media come and go. I have dozens of disks of various ages and types on which the stored data are simply inaccessible in the present day, let alone all the tapes and punched cards of previous generations of data storage that have ended up in landfill through obsolescence. A small personal for-instance. Today I was trying to retrieve the name of someone from past business contacts of over thirty-five years ago. No digital record made of the guy from that era still exists in any form. In my old Filofax from the early nineties, it took me ten minutes to dig him up. The contact details may be long out of date - he might even no longer be with us - but the information I sought was there within arm's reach and didn't involve any data tech whatsoever... 

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