Ten minutes ago it dawned upon me that I should not have thrown out all of my magazines. Granted there is an element of disposability to magazines and such, but there is also a permanence.

When I think about looking through my grandma’s top drawer or grandfather’s trunk and seeing personal artifacts clippings and pictures, I think about future generations. What will they look through? Grandpas bookmarks on his old laptop, his defunct flickr account, his old hard drive that you need a special cable to use because it is so old?

When we look at history, said history has been passed along through visual (i.e. Written / art / architecture ) and oral traditions. So there were multiple channels from which archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have been able to collect data from,  sift through and create hypotheses on the past. Looking fwd, the main repositories of information will be unused servers somewhere in the sticks.

Were there to be a cataclysmic event, are we to assume that the people of the future, or aliens, or whoever might stumble upon our crumbled remains will have a disk drive or better yet, a usb 2.0 slot available with which to find out what was going on in our time? Does Anybody have an 8 track or cassette player anymore? Yes. But those people are few and far between.

Information that needs a device/player/or complex mechanism to be displayed is disposable. As the world has gone digital this information has even less worth as all it really is, is a series of 1′s and 0′s dependant on hardware and software to interpret the sequence of the code.

Haha. Imagine the scene: an alien  finds the cd of the GNR classic album Appetite For Destruction , somehow figures out to put it in a computer, while waiting for something to happen, a pop up window appears “quicktime player needs a software update in order to play”

Thus the importance of the printed word…..

The pessimist rebutts  ”the news is only as good as the paper its printed on” However true that may be, the point is not so much to be paper crazed pack rats with no consideration of the environment, it is to realize that our society is becoming more and more disposable. We regard these changes as progress. Although strange is this form of progress–as we become more efficient, we become less permanent.

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