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I read this interesting article on how much information is transferred digitally over the course of the year. I found it quite interesting, mind-boggling, and in many ways astounding. Enjoy!
Posts: 1099 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
I read the OP yesterday, but I do most of my hatracking in short bursts at work in between things, so I don't generally read articles that people link to. I just don't have time at work. So, nothing to do with your post count, just didn't see any reason to respond if I wasn't going to read it.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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1) The comparison with the written word (stacks of books to the sun) is fallacious. Because most of the content is visual, the comparison with "the written word" is like comparing apples and oranges
2) Sending videos and photos over email has nothing to do with "web 2.0," which is more accurately and umbrella term for services that harness the power of large, independent user bases (like digg, del.icio.us, facebook and wikipedia).
3) The real IT problem is not data storage, despite the huge amount of data being created. Compression and redundancy make storage at most a marginal issue. The real problem is making data navigable, so you can find what you're looking for, and (perhaps more importantly) discover new, relevant data products based off of currently known products.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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pfresh and ElJay: No worries. I do the same thing all the time. My second post was not-so-subtly aimed at provoking SOME kind of response. I apologize sincerely for the blatant manipulation.
SenojRetep: I agree wholeheartedly about the comparison between spoken word in the history of the world to digital information for the same reasons. However, they DO say a picture is worth a thousand words! That makes a movie at 26 frames/second...well....LOTS of words!!
I can't speak to the Web 2.0 topic, since yesterday was the first time I'd even come across the term.
As for your third point, once again, I agree completely.
Lastly, I would raise another point. My grandfather, who started his career as a linguist and historian, has a great deal of respect for the written word. Writings from the past are obviously an invaluable resource for historians, and are the source for much of what we know of the past. Later in his life, my grandpa became a professor of computer science, but this was in the days of the punch cards and building-size glorified slide rules. Nevertheless, obsolescence in data storage is a HUGE concern for information.
Let me give an example. When I was in elementary school, I generated reports for school projects on an Apple IIe computer at home (you know, the kind with the green text on the black screen?). These were stored on a 5.5" floppy disk that, even if I knew where it was, would not be readable by most computers these days. If I wanted to recover that data, it would be very difficult.
In this decade, technology progresses further. If we want to retain our access to our digital information, it is necessary to continually update the medium on which we store it. 40 year old film recordings were transferred to VHS 20 years ago, and to DVD 5 years ago. In five more years, these will move to Blue-Ray, HD-DVD or whatever new-fangled media is created then.
But what if I have neither the time, energy, interest, or capital to achieve these transfers of information?
My grandpa used to have in his possession letters written between James Logan and his wife during the colonial period of the USA. James Logan served as the secretary to William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Pennsylvania colony. His wife maintained the Logan estate in Britain. These letters were donated to the Logan museum in PA and were a treasure trove of information that could not be found in official records. What were the concerns of day-to-day life? In what manner did well-to-do Quaker couples relate to each other? This is the kind of thing that some historians thrive on.
In the days of email communication, so much of this everyday correspondance is going to be lost due to obsolescence or seeming irrelevance and deleted. Granted, there is a significantly larger volume and redundancy in digital communication, but this could potentially be a problem.
As a matter of fact, I seem to remember Asimov discussing the problem of record-keeping and obsolescence in his prequels to the Foundation series, in which Hari Seldon attempts to research the days of antiquity, but many of the computer records are unintelligable to his modern equipment.
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hopefully not many recordings were transfered from film to vhs to dvd, because VHS is so prone to degradation.
But we aren't as susceptible to data loss anymore. If you want to save something that is in a digital format now, you don't need to rely on specialized hardware to read it. If you had the digital files from those 5.25" floppies, I could read them today. The medium that data is stored on is no longer as important as the digital integrity of the data.
Also, data that is on DVD now will not need to be transferred to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD to be readable in five years. That is digital information that can be stored on any medium large enough.
As far as emails go, if somebody wants to save them, they will never be lost due to obsolescence. Digital data can be repackaged in any new format easily, and as long as we are still using text to convey information, it will still have meaning. Asimov didn't have the perspective to understand modern digital equipment. Even if we go through a drastic change in file system (which will probably happen in the next ten years), old data will be easily repackaged or translated and accessible within the new format.
The only data that I am not able to access in a form that I want are the old shareware games for my system 7 Mac. But I can see the data, it is not lost, I just can't find an emulator that will make them able to play. But that's like having an ancient text written in a language you yourself don't understand. Somebody could eventually write a translation.
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quote:Originally posted by Nato: But that's like having an ancient text written in a language you yourself don't understand. Somebody could eventually write a translation.
True enough. More than likely, everything will be backwards compatible for long enough that the things we value NOW will be converted with each new revolution.
Lacking that, one just needs to find or make the digital age equivalent of the "rosetta stone" to understand older items.
But what if (by some freak of coincidences) your system 7 shareware games became historically relevant in a hundred years? There is no guarantee that a means of translating them to current systems would exist or be recoverable. Yes, the data is still there, but untranslateable.
What if the rosetta stone (or relics of comparable use) had never been discovered? How would some ancient writings ever have been translated?
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quote:Also, data that is on DVD now will not need to be transferred to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD to be readable in five years. That is digital information that can be stored on any medium large enough.
This is only moderately true, and in any case it's reasonably irrelevant. Let me deal with the first thing first: Certainly, all files are ones and zeros, but that has always been true. But you cannot go from ones and zeros to pictures unless you know the format, and the fact that it is 'digital information' is completely irrelevant to that. You have to know what is headers, what is real data, whether the data is stored as ARGB, RGBA, or something else, what the pixel screen size is... The difference between now and 1985 is not that we now use 'digital information' and they didn't back then (what do you suggest they would have used instead?) but rather that the standards are now large and public, instead of specific to each company. Everybody knows how to make an mp3, because the standard is public. But nothing says that information has to survive the next two hundred years; a better standard could easily come along in the next decade, after all.
Then, even if something could be transferred to a new format (software or hardware), why would it be? Sure, people transfer their VHS to DVD, or whatever, but not the whole collection. The grainy home movies tend to get thrown out. Copying like that costs time and effort.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:My grandpa used to have in his possession letters written between James Logan and his wife during the colonial period of the USA. James Logan served as the secretary to William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Pennsylvania colony. His wife maintained the Logan estate in Britain. These letters were donated to the Logan museum in PA and were a treasure trove of information that could not be found in official records. What were the concerns of day-to-day life? In what manner did well-to-do Quaker couples relate to each other? This is the kind of thing that some historians thrive on.
In the days of email communication, so much of this everyday correspondance is going to be lost due to obsolescence or seeming irrelevance and deleted. Granted, there is a significantly larger volume and redundancy in digital communication, but this could potentially be a problem.
As a matter of fact, I seem to remember Asimov discussing the problem of record-keeping and obsolescence in his prequels to the Foundation series, in which Hari Seldon attempts to research the days of antiquity, but many of the computer records are unintelligable to his modern equipment.
That's why I plan on slurping my blog every couple of years, since I don't keep a hard-copy journal any more.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Then, even if something could be transferred to a new format (software or hardware), why would it be? Sure, people transfer their VHS to DVD, or whatever, but not the whole collection. The grainy home movies tend to get thrown out. Copying like that costs time and effort.
I think that's what I was trying to say, but if it didn't come across that way, then thank you KOM for re-stating it far more eloquently.
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I think that's what I was trying to say, but if it didn't come across that way, then thank you KOM for re-stating it far more eloquently.
