Physical is way to go

Nothing is permanent

Like it was said in the Bible, Nothing new under the sun. In this context I am talking about all the great - or even not so great - information and data what humankind has ever created but what is now lost, maybe even forever. Servers where data was stored might got broken, somebody have purposefully or by accident removed the content, there might have not been backups, customer has died or otherwise hadn't paid the bills of the hosting and slowly the content has vanished to its final resting place to the great unknown, to the cemetary of dead bits.

I wrote partly same things also on my text Digital life - chaotic life, but on this text I whine more about these issues since these digital life issues are not problematic only personal point of view.

Data is not permanent. It has never been, probably, but still the effort required to get rid of all of the published content all around the world is nowadays so small that it can happen with a simple accident - especially on smaller websites like this. Of course I have my HTML pages on git version control system and I also replicate my site content every night for backup to another server what is hosted by another company so at least I should not be able that easily to remove this page, but that might not be the case for many websites.

So much data can be lost so easily and permanently that in future we might not have much of information stored from current era of living. That would be quite ironic since currently we are living probably in the information overload, but in bigger picture I wouldn't count this unrealistic scenario. Lots and lots of information comes, stays some time and finally it just disappear to be never found again. Of course I do not believe we lose everything from this era of living in our digital memories as a humanity, but huge amounts of meaningful personal information and data can be lost for so many people that there might not be any pictures and videos left of current generation of kids when they grow older.

I record home videos with my Sony CX240 handycam. It basically goes with me almost everywhere I go. Like in all things digital, backing up videos is something what you have to think about if you want to be sure that your data stays for years to come. I have even made backups of my edited home videos to VHS. Yes, that good old VHS, that big bulky tape in the box. Reason for this is simple - in digital formats it is easy to lose everything too easily, but on VHS it takes more effort to destroy whole recording, or at least it does not happen that easily by accident. Of course the quality is not the same, but when I watch my good old home videos where sentimental value is the most important thing I am more keen that quality is "good enough" and it is good to watch in next 20 years if God gives me that many years or more. In VHS I am quite confident that it is the case, but on any digital storage method, not so much. Surely I have multiple backups, but the backup I trust most on these videos is analogue VHS. It just works and I have many VHS movies from 90's and older and they still work and are watchable.

It is probably good that lots of information disappears, but when important personal data gets lost it is quite often just sad. Another big probelm when data disappears, especially from the internet, is the reliability of whole web on any kind of academic works etc. How we can use any information from internet as a information source on thesis for example if all the sources can too often just disappear from the public web in one way or another? Is that then any different than just making all the "facts" straight from our head and just put random URL as a source if that kind of source material can be anyway disappeared on time of reading that text?

Internet is not a trustworthy companion for imporant information

Big problem in web is link rot. In case that the term is not known it just means that links does not work anymore because the document is not there anymore where it was when somebody made a link to that page. The site where article points might not exists anymore, page might have been renamed differently, in site renewal old articles might have been removed etc. Lots of reasons what can cause this, but whatever the case, it is just purely annoying and makes web as a reliable source seems to be more like a bad joke than actual good source.

This link rot especially seems to be problematic. If the whole site is down where links leads us then it is understandable that the source is lost since the whole site is lost. Most annoying it is when the website still exists and there is lots and lots of articles and content but the link does not seem to work anymore directly to that page when it has been working previously. If the content is there but you want to change it's URL to something else, please at least make some kind of redirect on your webserver so old links does not die.

Another issue of course what makes web unreliable source is the possibility that any written information can be changed anytime to something else. For example if the news magazine writes totally wrong information and they later realize that it could cause them issues they just can rewrite the article but don't just update the last updated -data of the article. Problem solved. How anyone can prove that they wrote misinformation when the data is just changed later so easily?

Also problematic thing in web is the paywalls. If the information was freely available previously but later it is moved behind the paywall then it makes also harder for everybody to validate if your citations from that source were actually real or if you just write those from your mind. Surely if you have only one or two sources behind the paywall then often it is possible quite cheaply to check those sources, but whatabout if there was tens and tens of sources listed there what are now behind paywalls? It would be quite fast quite expensive to validate the sources.

Physical sources is still way to go

In digital era it still seems that only realiable and trustworthy source in long term is the physical media. I don't mean word trustworthy source as if the information in physical media would be more truthful; if can be totally crap, lies, propaganda as much the data on the web. In this area I don't believe there is much of difference. No, instead I mean that I can trust much more that the existence of the source does not disappear. If that source was a book, I can always go and find that book. I can own it and have it on my shelf so I can always validate if those sources said what somebody else said it said. Then I can make my own mind of course if the source itself is worth using as a source for exam for example, but that is totally different problem anyway.

Is there any digital media where it would be more trustworthy than its physical sibling as a source of information when the requirement is possibility to validate those sources later? Web sites goes down, links die and information can be changed anytime. On written books it is what it is. Surely there can be new versions of the books and often there will be, but as long as the old book is still available somewhere it is possible to check it.

Same happens for movies and music as well. If I want to reference lyrics of the song in whatever text then if I do not have that album as a CD/Vinyl/Cassette or whatever more permanent media what is not rewriteable then how I can be sure that the all digital versions won't be changed later because of whatever social rage and censorship? If we use songs from Spotify, Apple Music etc. and write analysis of the lyrics based on those versions available there, can we really be sure that the songs will stay the same next 30 years? For example if the artists says in lyrics something what could be seen as a controversial thing in the future it could cause the albums to be pulled off from these services or those might be changed to more "politically correct" for that era and therefore the analysis based on those versions directly loses its value if lyrics are changed too much.

Even tho the physical sources are not permanent either, but it is still much more permanent than almost any digital ever will be. Especially so if the source must be unmodified. Of course we can count md5 sums from digital files to validate that those are unmodified, but in the end all of this just makes life unnecessary complicated when there is much simpler solutions available. Physical items have been way to go and it seems to be the case in future as well.

2023-03-16