With the quickly-mounting death toll of newspapers, I wonder how the daily news is going to be archived. Surely, we can't rely solely on digital files.
One of the joys in reading an old newspaper is to see how an entire page paints a portrait of an era, from the articles to the ads and everything in between. The same can't be said of internet news. A single web article from CNN.com will lose its context once the "related links" go dead and ad space draws a blank.
As much as we're witnessing a technological revolution, I fear that we may be entering another Dark Age in the eyes of future historians. The Dark Ages as we know them (AKA medieval times) are called that due to few surviving records from that time. Is that because the majority of people didn't read or write back then? Or did they, but the means to archiving their daily affairs failed miserably?
As saturated as we are these days with digital media (including this blog), I have little faith that any of it will endure for future generations to peruse. Nor will its validity. How do you carbon date an HTML file?
Farewell, newspapers!
One of the joys in reading an old newspaper is to see how an entire page paints a portrait of an era, from the articles to the ads and everything in between. The same can't be said of internet news. A single web article from CNN.com will lose its context once the "related links" go dead and ad space draws a blank.
As much as we're witnessing a technological revolution, I fear that we may be entering another Dark Age in the eyes of future historians. The Dark Ages as we know them (AKA medieval times) are called that due to few surviving records from that time. Is that because the majority of people didn't read or write back then? Or did they, but the means to archiving their daily affairs failed miserably?
As saturated as we are these days with digital media (including this blog), I have little faith that any of it will endure for future generations to peruse. Nor will its validity. How do you carbon date an HTML file?
Farewell, newspapers!