Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

which do you think will be ultimately more durable, print or digits?

If you publish something on the internet or store it in a computer, is it going to last as long as if you printed it on paper or published it in a physical book or magazine?

Will a hard drive last as long as paper?

I used to only trust hard copy, but papers burn and rot and are lost. I try to store my work at least three places on the net as well as my hard drive.

I could memorize it all, but then I might die.

Is our work ultimately ephemeral? Bound to disappear?

Do you worry about saving yours?

after experiencing several puter breakdowns (specially in the middle of huge research, etc), i say print is the way to go. Sure it will rot, get lost and get thrown away, but there might be a trace of it afterwards.


Not that i do this, but i do think it's a good thing to do.
i don't worry about saving.

sometimes i do it,
but i don't worry
(unless i again find myself collecting huge amounts of research)


judih

We've only been in the world of "digits" for a little while, so it's really impossible to say what's more durable. I voted conservative and stuck with print.

Even so, think of the Bible, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. You've got to agree these things have lasted thousands of years. I actually think the tendency for written material to last has more to do with the power of the words than whether they're on hard copy or computerized .

What's the longest lasting media? Who's to say? Everything has a limited shelf life. Love. Life. All of it.

Books do. When they are out of print, editions remain are priceless sometimes.

Computers networked together form a "web" and anything you write on here, including personal IM conversations and emails can be passed along person to person and saved by who knows who. Does that constitute a longer shelf life?

You could have a website and redesign it ad infinitum and save every verson of it you had and it can be stored on one host and then another and on and on and even when you thought you deleted your old version or your emails and your IM conversations, somebody else might have saved those files and thus a proliferation of eternall existence.

You could save all of the writings you ever wrote on one computer, publish them at diferent places on the net and sites could disappear as they do, their memory in your head 10, 15. 20, years old, stuff that happened like a ghost to you but boom, out of the clear blue sky comes someone who finds you again after all those years and says they saved a series of poems you wrote and you say no WAY, you're kidding and they say, Yep, sure did, and you could be elated because you thought you lost it and would never see it again, and not only that, you had forgotten about it entirely, and then, there it IS! YOU from 15 years ago!

Or maybe they have a tape of you playing the piano or flute and then there it is again, who you were and what you were doing, completely recorded with a halt in live time!

Recording is a miracle.

It can be mind boggling to think about the proliferation of written words or sound bytes or nights which you wish you had remembered or flights of fancy you had hoped to forget.

Read me in tomorrow's dream, uncertain of dawn. Put my lenses on and I'll put on your glasses. What's the longest lasting publishing media? ....................Your eyes....... And the size of your heart. And the way you last in my arms until morning's song longs for a complete afternoon.

Media lasts as long as the users of it decide it's worthwhile.

Ohhhh, which reminds me! I've got this Rocky & Bullwinkle DVD I got last Thursday but haven't watched yet! I OWN it now! It's like 5 episodes or somthing like that with Fractured Fairy Tales and Dudley Dooright of the Mounties and Poebody all the rest and someone was smart enough to record it so 30 years later I could watch it tonight.

THAT's called a Long Shelf Life.

Why? Because the material is good. It lasts. It stands the test of time. It's the material, not the media which determines the shelf life.