BFTP: Impermanence

Between jet lag, work, holidays, and sheer laziness, the blog's been neglected. And it's spring which always sends me, as an educator, into a downward spiral of doubt about my career choices. Wouldn't the life of a long-haul truck driver or industrial chemical salesman really be far more rewarding? Ah, well, to brighter days ahead.

Of Sophocles 123 plays, only seven have survived.

The melting snow this weekend led to thoughts of the transience of life. This morning's walk showed shrinking drifts uncovering a winter's worth of detritus -  beer cans, cigarette butts and disintegrating prophylactics (making me somewhat wistful for a misspent youth that seemed only few short years ago). Doing my taxes yesterday emphasized the fleeting nature of income. Watching the Oscar previews reminded me of how damn old some actors are getting with a lot of white in a lot of beards.

Karl Fisch's concern about links to students work being lost after their Google Apps for Education accounts are deleted started me thinking a little more about the seeming impermanence of digital data, information, and knowledge. When the link is broken to an electronic resource, too often it seems like the resource itself is gone.

One of the reasons I've switched from using .pdf files to a wiki for providing support materials for my workshops is the ease with which "link rot" can be pruned. Website locations change, some disappear completely, and new materials are always be available. Anything I've not updated in the last six months needs at least a few changes.

The internal content and value of websites change without notice as well. My concern about Wikipedia has always been not that it may be inaccurate, but that it may be accurate now and inaccurate five minutes from now.

Perhaps it is my old mindset that makes this a concern greater than it needs to be. I know with my own work, I am definitely a "belts and suspenders" kind of guy. I pay for a commercial website for both my wiki and this blog, believing it will be more attentive to security and data integrity. I have an external drive on my desk I back up to and I use DropBox and GoogleDrive for all my files. I throw the best of my photos out on SmugMug.

And I've kept the hard copy of every magazine and book and newsletter in which one of my articles or columns has appeared over the past 20 years or so. That's a lot of tubs 'o print. When I next move, it will all get recycled.

Yet, I can't help but think that even this silly blog post may have a better chance of survival than Sophocles plays. Might the sheer number of digital copies of today's information make it less likely to be lost over time?

Just how ironic is that? With apologies to the great Greek playwrite:

You citizens of Thebes,
How insecure is human fortune knowledge!
Chance shall overthrow the great
And raise the lowly.
Nothing is firm either for confidence or despair.

_______________

Bob left this great poem as a comment to the original post:

With apologies to Shelley:

Techymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two shiny and powerless laptops
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered USB lies, whose cap,
And cracked plug, and sneer of old folders,
Tell that its user well those documents read
Which don’t survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that used them, and the CPU that fed;
And on the side these words appear:
“My name is Techymandias, king of info:
Look upon my storage, you Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing inside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal tech wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I love my readers.

Original post March 7, 2010