the place of fools and jesters

do you not hear, fellows? take away the lady.

Sunday, August 29, 2004

the ancient/modern thing

(Rather than being about literature, this is just things that are more interesting than my normal life back on god ol’ moonbright)
My father said the other day, ‘if you cut something in stone, it will last for ages, while if you put something on CD it will not last as long. This is just the argument that I made up against, I don’t necessarily believe it, but since I have the benefit of replies on this here site, I was sort of hoping that I could get some and see what other people under the age of, well, fifty thought.
The argument goes thusly:
If you had some information, let’s use the example of a report or an essay or piece of writing about something, and cut it into a stone slab, so that the writing could not be erased (sic) easily, so that it could not be lost or changed, that piece of writing would indeed last a long time. It would not be moved, lost or broken without some major effort being put in. However, the writing would take a good amount of time, and since it could not be moved, few people would see it, read it and take in the information.
However, if this information was written onto a CD, the CD could be easily copied, passed around and read by many people. If then, the entire amount of CDs were somehow broken or burned in some sort of freak CD destroying event or catastrophe, all of those people who had seen the information would still remember, and so could work together if necessary to remember all of the information.
The stone would be harder to break, but there would be only one of it, so if it were broken or rendered illegible, fewer people would have had the chance to see it, fewer could remember it and so some of the information could be lost.
There are flaws in this argument, such as, you could always copy the stone thing onto paper etc. if the people that saw the CDs all died no one would remember but the stone would still stand and could be read by others, whoever carved the stone would probably know the piece of writing pretty damn well, and other things that I haven’t spotted. The older generation with whom I have argued this point (my parents, both 52 I think) have been arguing against technology, and since stone is well known to last, it seems reasonable enough, but I’m not sure if technology is so bad after all. It seems to have become that technology is well known to be unreliable. It started off as infallible, then there was a sort of anti-system idea that technology was unreliable which became more widespread. But still, it does seem to work in some ways, though perhaps we can only be sure of things if we know that technology will continue to work in the future. But how can we be sure that anything will be reliable in the future? Stone may be affected by something that makes it crumble if anyone looks at it too hard, we don’t know.
Well, this wasn’t really meant to turn into a philosophical observation; the main question is to do with stones and CDs.If anyone thinks anything at all, I’d be interested to know.