Apple just announced it's iBooks 2 Textbook service. And especially in light of the recent discovery of Foxconn and Mike Daisey's account of working conditions, I am even more sickened by technology. I too was once a die hard Apple Devotee. I still have my First computer a, Woz edition Apple IIgs that I never plan on giving up. And like Daisey, I too didn't fully grasp where all our technology came from, and as he did, imagined long robot equipped assembly lines. But this post wasn't intended to be about Foxconn, or the many other technology factories with abysmal labor conditions, but it will be hard to separate that bad taste from the sour smell of things to come in the Information Age.
Book publishers are panicking, everything is in E-book form from newspapers to novels and now text books. I don't see this as bad, but it is still sad to see a time warn trade die. Book publishers are in the direct line of fire from Amazon.com. Now, the publishers can come and go, but the idea that the printed page might soon become only a novelty is sad. Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection, with digital imaging replacing traditional photography, the centuries old company is becoming obsolete. It't not the businesses collapsing that worry me, its the lost of the industry in general, and the lost of these methods for producing concrete photographs and printed documents.
There are rumblings of a future Data Apocalypse, and it has many forms and implications. One of the most significant is simply Data Storage. There are no archival methods for digitally storing information. Roughly every 5 to 10 years, all that data has to be updated on to new systems as hard drives, flash media, and computer operating systems changes. Even if you were to etch a tungsten disk with binary information that would be nearly indestructible, if you tried to read it 100 years later, how would your be able to read it? The computer software that coded the file could have been lost. Even with the data intact, the method to read it is not archival.
A friend once told me, "A sharp blade will never be obsolete." With that idea in mind, I also see the Printed page being the same way. Even if a language might become obsolete in time, the lifespan of an archival low acid paper and the language that the words are written in will outlive several generations of computer formats.
Perhaps it is just the unease with how dedicated we are to technology, that even though my computer is very important to me, I still like to have some traditional technology at my disposal that doesn't require logins or batteries. Maybe my mind is too focused on a fictional zombie apocalypse scenarios, and want to know how to survive with 20th century comfort with 19th century technology. My fixation with a zombie apocalypse, or any apocalypse for that matter is subject for a future post.
In 1859 the worst solar storm ever recorded hit the Earth. A coronal mass ejection shot towards Earth at the peak of a 500 year solar maximum. Thankfully technology of those days was still mostly steam and horse power. However, telegraph stations in the Northern US experienced an electro magnetic burst, causing telegraph lines to ignite and telegraph stations to burn down. And what would happen if this happened today? Im sure there are some bad History Channel shows which sensationalize this topic. It would be a technological Apocalypse or Techocalypse. This would be a major earth changing event, and one that would set back the technological age a few decades. Computer systems would fry. Simple lighting might take days or weeks to repair, but the data, the vast stores of data in computers, severs and in the cloud, what would happen to that? Would it wipe away clean all information, or would it just damage the systems permanently?
And if society has to rebuild, what could we fall back on if the last printed book on any given topic is decades old? We would not only be thrown back to pre electricity lifestyle for a period of time. When we begin to rebuild, we might initially only be able to climb up to the time when the last printed information in Science, Engineering and Medicine was printed.
The future might give us some sort new technology, one that will effectively give us a Save point. Right now, given some ability, we probably would not be thrown any further back in time before electricity became widely used. Other circumstances would have to be in effect to throw us back further, but in the future we might find a new Save point, one that might lock technology from not being likely to fall back further than that level of achievement.
Who knows when that future save point might be, or what it is. Till then, keep a few books around, cause when the power goes out, you won't be able to go to Google to solve your problems.
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