Quote:
Originally Posted by CazMar
One of the reasons we don't have a huge amount of writing from the ancient western world (Greece and Rome) is not because they couldn't do "data transfer", i.e. rewriting the texts every few years because papyrus deteriorated, but because political and religious zealots simply decided it wasn't appropriate.
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That's not entirely the case, since it was "religious zealots" like Christian monks and Islamic scholars who actually did the work of protecting and re-copying texts -- including a few as disruptive as
Satyricon. AFAIK Japan never had an equivalent to Qin Shi Huang, but many cultural writings are still lost.
Books have been lost or destroyed for many reasons, none of which are simple.
Digital has one advantage in that recopying data is relatively easy; Gutenberg's archives might be 1 or 2 TB total, which would be very easy these days to duplicate. Music and movies are currently a bit much, but in 5-10 years you will likely be able to fit digital versions of the world's content in a relatively small container.
However, collecting all that data in one place is not easy, nor is keeping up with all the new content -- e.g. over 270,000 new books were published in 2009 in the US alone (47k fiction, 24k sociology/econ, 13k science). That figure doesn't include newspapers, websites, government reports, academic journals....
And again, the bottom line is you need an intermediary device. So not only do you need to protect the recorded media, you also need to ensure the existence of the dozes, if not hundreds, of intermediary devices. It's not any easy task, and it's already driving archivists up a wall.