bt’s Weblog

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a wonderful essay in yesterday’s NY Times about his paperback book collection. The title is “Yellowing Paper, Stiffening Glue and the Sudden Demise of a Library” (requires membership) and contains such notable phrases as, ‘nothing meters the passing of time like paperback books’ and ‘The books themselves are not really worth restoring, of course. Their texts may be of permanent value, but the physical objects are not.’

It reminded me of my thousand year project of what gets preserved and how. I have two or three hundred paperbacks and a few of them are yellowed and brittle. I should toss them but there’s ever a small voice that says, ‘you might want to read that one again. It’s a classic, after all’ and I put it back, gently, on the shelf.

I recommend Klinkenborg’s essay even if it costs you a bit to get at it. I felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit who laments that ‘Some days I suspect that the objects around me are aging faster than I am’ and closes with an opinion on digitizing that puts that process in a new light for me.

And as for you who will write in and say, “Aha! This only proves the value of digitizing books,” let me simply say that it is not possible to digitize a book. You can digitize its contents, photograph its binding, record every last scrap of penciled annotation it contains. And yet the book cannot be digitized any more than one could digitize the vague, inarticulate sense I have that I know where that quotation is, if only I could find the book it’s in.

It is 21 degrees F with a respectable wind speed that is blowing very light powered snow down and around. The hyperweather actually happened so it isn’t hyper, is it?

My Epson 4490 scanner is working well and today I’m doing some prints of photos I took in Forestville, MD (near D.C.) after the Blizzard of (February) ‘66. That’s when nearly two feet of snow fell and closed the school for a week. Two blizzards, forty years apart and the photos let my memory bridge the gap as if it weren’t there at all.

The scanning has brought this fact to the fore in relation to time and my thousand year ‘project’ and the place of memory in the mix. One fact that could be a thesis or two for those interested is that even though the subjects of the photos are years older they somehow exist in my mind and emotions as they were when the photo was taken.

So do we have an infinite number of persons within that one person? How many experiences and interactions have been recorded and ‘frozen’ with those individuals? It is said that even after death we remain alive as long as someone remembers us and my experience of the 30 year old photo bringing back things long past suggests there is some truth to that. But I do not experience what the other does and once I am gone my memories go with me.

I can post all the photos I want and append extensive explanations of the time, place, circumstances, emotions and background of the photo but still you will have your own reaction and it may be nothing like mine. The subject would understand the context and his own feelings and they would be different from mine.

It seems we must rely on our own abilities to emphathize with a photo subject and to the degree we succeed we keep that subject ‘alive’ even for a thousand years.

Last week was the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas and what struck me most was the fact that he lived only 800 years ago. That’s 200 years short of my thousand year ‘message’ project. So I decided to get a handle on the sweep of history to get a better idea of what sorts of information last.

Even though our species, homo sapiens, appeared 100,000 years ago it wasn’t until 4,500 B.C. that what we term civilization began in Sumer (now Iraq) and a bit later (4,200 B.C.) in Egypt. The Jewish Calendar begins with 3,760 B.C. and the first city state, Sumeria is dated 3,000 B.C. The Chinese, Indus Valley and Stonhenge civilizations began around the same time. That is an interesting fact since there was no (possible?) contact among these groups.

From 2,000 to 1,000 B.C. things picked up a lot in the Mediterranean area as well as India and China. We have a lot more information about these times. Much of it is about the rise and fall of kingdoms and lots of wars. The same continues for the next thousand years but in greater detail and with more participants. The Greeks and Romans were especially warlike. The Mayan Civilization flourished in Mexico during this time.

The Roman Empire ended half way through the next thousand years. Islam was born, Europe connected with China and Buddhism arose in Japan during this period. The Dark or Middle Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire (476) and lasted for a thousand years.

The just completed thousand years, 1,000 - 2,000 A.D. started with the First Crusade (1095) followed by seven more over the next 200 years. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. The Renaissance began a hundred years later. The Age of Discovery began around 1400 and the rest, as they say, is history. The second milennium ended with a century of war with World War II being probably the most horrific humanity has engaged in.

It seems that civilizations, kingdoms, religions and wars are classes of information that persist over the millenia. Maybe this blog has to deal with such things to have a chance of lasting (joke time).

Here’s an article from CNN that I came across when I started looking into information overload.

Age of information overload Monday, December 26, 2005; Posted: 12:14 p.m. EST (17:14 GMT)

Here are my comments on some of its contents:

(AP) — Books are being scanned to make them searchable on the Internet. Television broadcasts are being recorded and archived for online posterity. Radio shows, too, are getting their digital conversion — to podcasts.
With a few keystrokes, we’ll soon be able to tap much of the world’s knowledge. And we’ll do it from nearly anywhere — already, newer iPods can carry all your music, digital photos and such TV classics as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” along with more contemporary prime-time fare.
Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data?
“People are already struggling and feeling like they need to keep up with the variety of information sources they already have,” said David Greenfield, a psychologist who wrote “Virtual Addiction.” “There are upper limits to how much we can manage.”

Not all of the items mentioned are information. Much of the above is entertainment. Clearly, the amount of “instantly accessable information” will not make anyone smarter or dumber and it shouldn’t make anyone more stressed. Greenfield notes that trying to “keep up” with information sources is a struggle but that depends on an individual’s choices. For example, if one tries to keep up with every implication of bills that are introduced in the U.S. Congress then I’d agree it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to do. One must rely on groups or individuals who specialize and take their word for what’s going on. As Greenfield says, “there are upper limits to how much we can manage.” As for lower limits? Perhaps the adjective “upper” is understood and therefore unnecessary, yes?

It may take better technology to cope with the problems better technology creates.
Of course, if used properly, the new resources have vast potential to shape how we live, study and think.
Consider books.
Nicole Quaranta, 22, is a typical youth. The New York University grad student in education does most of her research online. She’ll check databases for academic journals and newspaper articles — but rarely books, even though she acknowledges an author who spent years on a 300-page book might have a unique perspective.
“The library is daunting because I have to go there and everything is organized by academic area,” Quaranta said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Were books as easily searchable as Web pages, she’d reconsider.
Otherwise, they might as well not exist.

The first two sentences are almost meaningless cliches. The word “technology” is becoming so abused it should be on life support but the interesting statement is that Nicole is a “typical youth.” Sorry, a graduate student at NYU is not typical. She’s at least one in a thousand or more. Her comment on libraries is classic - “I have to go there” (couch potato’s lament?) “everything is organized by academic area … I don’t even know where to begin.”
So if everything is organized and the Internet is anything but organized what is your problem? I think the answer is “easily searchable.” Perhaps Nicole prefers to type in “classroom management” and get enough to write a paper on it. I hope NYU’s librarians don’t get wind of this young woman’s opinions about their profession. Same goes for her professors who probably have a number of books and articles tucked away in the “daunting” library’s stacks. And then there’s the card catalog which almost certainly is on a computer and easily searchable.

Meanwhile, television shows formerly locked up in network or studio vaults are starting to emerge online. “Before, once it has been aired, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really contribute to our knowledge space,” said Jakob Nielsen, a Web design expert with Nielsen Norman Group.
For the past year, Google has been digitally recording news and other programs from several TV stations in the San Francisco area (although Google has limited display to still images and closed-captioned text until it settles copyright matters).
Early next year, America Online Inc. and Warner Bros. will offer free access to dozens of old television shows, including “Welcome Back Kotter.” And Apple Computer Inc. recently started selling episodes of shows old and new from ABC and NBC Universal for $1.99 each — viewable on computers and its newer iPods. The catalog includes “Lost” and “Law & Order.”

I think “knowledge space” is cute, don’t you? Thank you for sharing that thought Mr. (Web design expert) Nielsen. Some news shows may contain some information but the rest of the TV fare is entertainment which although it is good for us is very low density information. Those who own the rights to shows and music want to make more money on them so they will become available and will increase the amount of data available via the Internet but it isn’t information.

Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says centralization and easy access could make people smarter: Instead of wasting time finding information, they can focus more on assessing its worth.
But there’s the danger, he says, that people will simply take information for granted: Assuming that whatever pops up first is the best.
Worse, people may simply tune out.
Field research by Jennifer Kayahara, a sociology graduate student at the University of Toronto, shows people are overwhelmed as it is.
“For people who don’t search extensively online, that’s the reason they give: ‘There’s too much,”‘ she said, adding that people worry they might miss something yet don’t have the time to seek it out.

Centralization (concentration? distillation?) and easy access to information do not make people smarter. At best, it can make someone more informed on a topic. I agree that the easier it is to get information the more time one has to think about it but the element of judgement must be applied at each step of the process. Both Jones and Kayahara point to a common problem with “easy” information - many people are not disciplined enough to spend time comparing, judging and integrating multiple information sources. That is, humans are a bit on the lazy side and no technological improvement is going to change that. I suggest that education can do it and perhaps that’s what education is essentially - intellectual discipline.

“Social networks, search engines and things yet invented are critical as we bring millions of movies, books and musical recordings online,” said Brewster Kahle, a search pioneer who created the Internet Archive, a nonprofit preservation group.
Even more important will be good research skills — infoliteracy, if you will. That means knowing where and how to look, and evaluating what you get back.
And that’s crucial as people get inundated with electronic information 24/7 — not just at their computers. Cell phones are being transformed into search and browsing tools, and iPods are becoming small television displays.

Kahle’s job as an Internet archivist will certainly become more difficult as terabytes of entertainment data is dumped on the Internet but so little of that is information that it may not matter. Good research skills (see ‘education’ above) have always been necessary for evaluating data sources. The Internet and its search engines (love that word, it’s so Newtonian) bring us a large number of sources that are yet to be ranked according to some integrity scale. Again, much of the above is the problem of entertainment and communication overload, not information.

Rachel Edelman, 21, an NYU junior in communications studies, finds her vintage, music-only iPod enough of a distraction.
“If I’m listening to music, I’m not going to be thinking about other things, about school work, friends, family or relationships, even just noticing things on the street and noticing changes in the city,” she said.
And with wireless Internet access creeping into every niche of life — it’s even coming to airplanes and taxis — we’ll have to carve out retreats from the information age.
“If you fill every waking minute with more media, you never do any independent thinking,” Nielsen said. “You may have all the specific pieces of information, but the higher level is knowledge and understanding. You don’t have time for that reflection if it’s being thrown at you at never-ending streams.
“All you can do is duck.”

The closing paragraphs muddle information overload and the “noise” that various kinds of electronic appliances generate. We need retreats from the noise, not from the information age. Mr. Nielsen returns with a truism about filling your waking life with “media” vs thinking but rather botches up the tag line.

I believe he’s trying to say that one needs time to synthesize information into knowledge. That is also what education should be - how to put two and two together while the ipod is playing your song and you’re on the phone with your current flame. If you can’t do that then hang up and think.

On a recent stroll through an old cemetary I noticed that a number of graves were marked “Perpetual Care” and I couldn’t help but snicker at such optimism. Perpetual is a very long time to care for a grave or anything else.

This blog is on a server that has a 3 to 5 year life expectancy. I ran one for seven years and there may be some that continue to operate for ten but computers wear out quickly compared to the buildings they are housed in. Data can be migrated to new servers to extend its life but eventually I will not be alive to see that it continues to be available. The building that houses the server may last a hundred years or more and the institution, Holy Cross High School, may last even longer but there is no guarantee that the blog’s database will do so.

The blog can be stored on a disc in an archive but in a fairly short time the data will no longer be readable because the software is gone. I have email archives from Netscape which are only 8 years old and although I can still get at them it won’t be long before no program will know what to do with that format. My text databases will fare much better in that regard. As long as the medium doesn’t decay or the data is moved to ‘fresh’ media the text will last as long as the English it’s written in is understandable.

In all of this it is clear (to moi) that you must have an institution devoted to saving your ‘message’ if it is to have any chance of survival beyond your lifespan. The Catholic Church has maintained the writings of many theologians and even secular scholars for well over a thousand years. The Bible contains material that was first written 2500 years ago and there are even older texts from Greek and Egyptian times. The institutions keep the messages alive not only by preservation but by re-translating them for each successive age.

One characteristic of each New Year is the ritual of wrapping up the old year with lists of the best and worst of just about everything. These wrap-ups could serve as a starting point for building a thousand year summary of events.

Memorable events are data points that represent a filtered view of each passing year. This filtering process is a natural attribute of memory in that only certain events qualify as memorable in the life of an individual as well as a society. Another way of looking at it is that the majority of events are forgettable e.g. what you ate for breakfast (if indeed you eat breakfast) or what you wore to work on the first Monday of February last year.

What wrap-ups effectively do is posit those things that are worthy of remembering and the rest are wrapped up and thrown away. My list and your list and the NY Times’ list on any given topic will differ but it seems that only the latter will count in the memory of the nation. In the thousand year view only institutional memories are preserved.