I am beginning to understand why previous generations carved information into stones. It is because thousands of years later people can still see them and in most cases read/interpret the information. Thus withstanding the test of time, long after the demise of the people who engraved what they felt was important to them in stone. I have been writing and telling stories for over twenty years and almost everything I have written has been by hand, with a pen and paper. It was only after I started trying to compose everything on an electronic device that things started to go wrong. I know I am not the only person to lose their data from a resultant computer crash, but I have had this happen to me twice in a single month. It is frustrating; I was almost back to a point of recovery when my new computer crashed. No form of recovery possible the second time. Fortunately we have thumb drives, clouds and online back up these days, but they only help you if bother to use them. Have I learned my lesson? Have you? Likely we will all manage to lose data that is important to us again.
It has been through my slow recovery process that I began to think about what will someone two thousand years from now do with my thumb drive or stack of back up DVD’s? Neither is as simple as staring at some hand carvings on stone. (Just as Greek to me actually as computer code is.) Even if the world has morphed into some gigantic network of machines, will it have the capability to read our data? Will our electronic medium become so useless that we will in effect leave nothing behind? Keep in mind that every electronic device we own has been fabricated using parts made by the cheapest bidder. If I can have a component on a machine break after just 32 days in use, it becomes obvious to me that none of our electronics will stand the test of time. We will be a minor footnote in world history, which will be based solely on the preserved printed books we leave behind. This as irony will likely have it, will all be books that have been written by reality TV “stars”.
It has been through my slow recovery process that I began to think about what will someone two thousand years from now do with my thumb drive or stack of back up DVD’s? Neither is as simple as staring at some hand carvings on stone. (Just as Greek to me actually as computer code is.) Even if the world has morphed into some gigantic network of machines, will it have the capability to read our data? Will our electronic medium become so useless that we will in effect leave nothing behind? Keep in mind that every electronic device we own has been fabricated using parts made by the cheapest bidder. If I can have a component on a machine break after just 32 days in use, it becomes obvious to me that none of our electronics will stand the test of time. We will be a minor footnote in world history, which will be based solely on the preserved printed books we leave behind. This as irony will likely have it, will all be books that have been written by reality TV “stars”.