This Digital Age

In the first place let me acknowledge the irony of my posting this particular discussion on an electronic forum. Although I recognize the convenience of reading MacLean’s Magazine via an electronic subscription especially when I’m on the road and admit that I presently have no less than four electronic book readers installed on my computer I remain essentially a book  person; there is no substitute for holding the page in one’s hand. Books may have copyrights but there is no such thing as digital rights management issues to printed text. At present I am struggling with the fact that Microsoft Reader will not allow me to read the books I have transferred to this laptop after a necessary re-imagining of the operating system.

 

Last spring I read the letters written home by a young WW#2 soldier edited by his son after they were found in a packet behind his grandfather’s basement furnace. In this age of instant messaging, tweets, and text messaging no such records will be left behind. Even E-mail and Word Documents exist only as positives and negatives on a hard drive and as we all know all hard drives fail sooner or later.  When famous people and authors die it is common to see published edited editions of their correspondence. In a time when these exist only as electronic media the opportunity to release such publications will become less possible as old versions of software, encryption, and password protected files and computers make accessing these documents more difficult. Just ask people who had their cell phone data stored in the ‘cloud’ and lost it when the servers failed without backup.

 

Those who have followed this blog for any length of time have already read that my father didn’t trust the phone, when he wanted to talk to someone he got in his truck and drove to see them in person. Today people send tweets or text messages to relatives located in the same building. Letters are something one sends when a text copy of a document is absolutely required or one needs to communicate with the few people who have not yet entered the digital age. People still feel the need to send Birthday, Valentines, and Christmas Cards. However these days I send messages by E-mail and do much of my ordering and financial transactions online. However since I hit the road I have not felt the need to possess a cell phone and do not feel a pressing need to be constantly in contact with the world at large online.

 

Not everything about our online digital age is a negative. Etymologists are finding electronic access to texts a boon in discovering when a word was first used or when it was used in a particular fashion. However were there to be a catastrophic electro-magnetic storm that wiped out all electronic media worldwide what would be left for archaeologists of the future to study in assessing the culture of our age?