Screen Grabs: The Digital Dialect and New Media Theory

There were several things in this article that I found very interesting, but the one I think is most important to discuss, and that we haven't discussed before, is the idea of "bit rot."

It comes up on page XX in the introduction, when he is defending having published a book instead of releasing it online. He says, "Nothing ages faster and become inaccessible quicker than electronic media." It's true, you can look at even just the storage that has evolved and what is now obsolete - 5 1/4" floppy disks, 3 1/2" floppy disks, zip disks - thought to be the next new technology and actually installed in computers, now never seen. CD-ROMs became pretty standard, but that's now becoming displaced by DVD-ROMs.

It really is a problem in terms of getting people to embrace technological copies of things. People are happy to try new technologies, but they don't want to use them for anything lasting, like books or music. People are happy to use new technologies and hype them up, but if you ask them to invest in technologies that they're not sure are steady. VHS and DVD have been embraced, though VHS is dying. But people won't invest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD except the people who really want to be at the forefront and have the best new gadgets, because one will triumph over the other at some point.

My dad, who does photography, runs into this problem. Negatives can fade or break, but people know how to take care of them. However, if you store digital photography on cds, the CDs will fade after a while and people don't know the lifetime of them. On top of that, you may save the file in a format that becomes obsolete, and you won't be able to retrieve that picture again, whereas the negatives and enlargers have been used for the past hundred years, and will continue to be used in the same way as they have for a long time to come.

Some systems are backwards compatible, but to build a less clunky, more efficient computer system you need to take out the backwards compatibility. Windows XP upset a lot of people because it wasn't backwards compatible to Windows 95 or 98. New game systems like X-Box 360 weren't backwards compatible, which upset a lot of people, so they released individual patches for individual past games.

It really is a barrier to embrace of technology as a whole, to assure people that they can embrace technologies even when it's going to be replaced sometime in the future.