Digital is never forever - print still matters

Photo by Mayer Tawfik on Unsplash

We have lulled ourselves into a false security that digital content is permanent and have therefore entrusted our society's most important records to servers, often owned by commercial corporations. But as file formats change every few years and new technologies make old ones obsolete, everything has to be converted and updated and some content may be lost on the way. Files can be corrupted or hacked. Our own stores of family photos and videos will probably not last as long as the old negatives and tapes unless we keep updating them. I have several disks and CD-ROMs that have become unreadable. Digital vulnerability is an issue.

A new threat has been added now that we depend so much on cloud storage and streaming. The company that owns the service can at any time decide to withdraw certain services or even delete content. This digital vulnerability is highlighted in an article on Slate, Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Users of Amazon's Kindle platform for e-books who had bought George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm discovered recently that the books had been suddenly deleted from their devices. Amazon claimed that there were legal irregularities with the copies and therefore they had to delete them. The users were refunded and the explanation seemed plausible. This has happened with other publications as well but the irony of the two most famous works of a dystopian authoritarian future being suddenly deleted from all devices is alarming. Even if this may have been an honest mistake it shows that these companies have enormous power of the content we can access.

The worst thing about this story isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That’s an awesome power, and Amazon’s justification in this instance is beside the point.

We still have millions of printed copies of these books as well as digital versions on other e-book platforms but if we continue to move towards a completely digital future the risks are clear. Our digital content can be deleted, our accounts can be blocked and our access limited. It's not hard to imagine how this power can be misused. In a rational, civilised society governed by laws that work in the interests of the public good this would be regulated but we don't live in that sort of world today. We have put enormous power in the hands of a few extremely powerful global corporations.

Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. Steve Jobs has confirmed that every iPhone routinely checks back with Apple to make sure the apps you’ve purchased are still kosher; Apple reserves the right to kill any app at any time for any reason. But why stop there? If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I’ve predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too.

One of many disturbing echoes of the 1930s is the growth in banning and even burning books that challenge the narrow-minded values of a government or militant political or religious movement. This is not restricted to authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran or China but also now in many European countries, both western and eastern. Authorities can try to stop libraries from lending certain books or schools from letting pupils read them or even stop shops from selling them, but copies will always be out there and people will hide them and circulate them even when banned. That's how many important works have survived through years of repression and tyranny. Once printed books are out there it is impossible to be sure that you have eliminated them all.

Digital is different however. In the world of e-books you never really own your e-book, it is dependent on the device or app you use to read it with and that can be upgraded, replaced or disappear completely. When a digital service dies all your content goes with it unless you get advance warning and find a way to download it. My music collection on Spotify exists only as long as I pay the subscription and the company still offers the service. Quite a few songs on my Spotify playlists are shaded in light grey with the explanation that they are no longer available. They haven't been censored or anything like that but we have to accept that content can be withdrawn. If Google pulled the plug on this platform, Blogger, all my blog content goes with it. Digital is never forever.

Digital content is transient and unreliable. It can be deleted without your consent and I'm sure with the growth of AI, all content can be manipulated and changed to better reflect a dominant ideology. We need to preserve knowledge safely for the future and not be reliant on just one medium.Print still matters.

Ownership is access

 Some rights reserved by N.Calzas

Remember record collections? Shelves in your living room or bedroom filled with LPs or CDs that you would proudly show off to friends. A trophy cabinet revealing your music tastes. I've still got a pile of vinyl albums but they've been hidden away in a cupboard and although the stereo system with record deck is still there it's a long time since I used it. Music used to take up a lot of our living space and used up a lot of cash.

Today music has become invisible in our homes. Our entire music collection is on our mobiles or stored in the cloud and household stereo systems have shrunk to a couple of mini-speakers for an iPod. We don't even need to spend money on music any more since streaming services like Spotify and Pandora let us listen to almost anything on demand without having to own it.

This is the subject of an article on CNN, Young listeners opting to stream, not own music. Owning music is becoming irrelevant since it can all be accessed online. Instead of owning music we are willing to pay for access. File sharing also becomes irrelevant if everything is available on demand anyway. The music collection that was such a status symbol a mere 20 years ago has vanished, as have the record stores.

Technically this same development can happen any time in other areas. Streamed e-books for example are already being tried and I can see great potential here for books that you need for a short time but may not want to own such as school textbooks and popular fiction. Films could also go this way and the big question is how much we would be willing to pay for a Spotify-like service for films or books. You pay for access not content. It's all technically possible but especially in the case of the film industry there are some very sensitive toes that risk getting squashed and big earnings to be defended.

The computer is dead, long live the cloud!

Our computers are going on a crash diet and could soon be ultra-thin. This video from Google could just be a major landmark in the history of IT. They are releasing a new concept in laptops, Chromebooks, and the revolutionary feature is that they do not need heavy programs, file managers and tons of extras like the standard laptop. Basically the Chromebook lets you access the net and that's it.

It's a logical step really since you can do just about everything you want in the cloud today, so why bother filling your hard drive with uneccessary flab? Without this heavy burden the Chromebook can start up almost immediately (the desktop I'm writing on now can take at least 5 minutes to get up and running). If everything is stored in the cloud you don't need to download anything and consequently there's no need to have virus protection. Irritating updates and patches will disappear since the version on the net will always be updated. When you can easily and cheaply subscribe to a massive cloud-based library of music/films/books/games why then go to the trouble of downloading copies? Of course people will always find ways of beating the system but this innovation could lead to the end of file sharing since there will be little point in it.

How long will it take before our trusty desktop computers and software-heavy laptops head the same way as the fat TV and CD-players? The tide could turn very quickly if the price is right. The only problem could be that the whole concept of cloud computing is still relatively unknown to the vast majority. It might however be easier to use than grappling with the extremely unpredictable and infuriating quirks of the average desktop.

What will this mean for education? It could make computing affordable for all since such thin terminals shouldn't costs anything like today's laptops. What does this mean for all the schools and universities that have just invested heavily in providing students with laptops and iPads?

Read Mashable's summary of this, Google explains life after the desktop.