A Digital Future
January 08, 2008
I just read an article in the New York Times Magazine that reflected on the diminishing value of physical objects. Keeping It Real is about Magna Carta selling for $21-plus million dollars. Posing the question of why someone would pay so much for a document that is freely available on the Interweb or in your public library, James Gleick writes:
“…the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.”
Yesterday I pulled out Wynton Marsalis’ Black Codes (From the Underground) vinyl record and have been listening to it over and over. Today, because we’ve converted our music collection over to iTunes, I sold our stereo on craigslist to an older couple who has a large collection of audio cassette tapes.
I don’t have a proper conclusion about any of this, but in pondering it there seems to be a truth in saying that in The Great Digitizing of Everything a deeper and more holistic appreciation for many things in life has been lost to convenience. I mean to say that there is an undeniable loss and gain in embracing a digital future, and right now I’m thinking about the loss.