David Akin

Vanishing Points

With writing, photography and audio at our disposal, we should be able to do far better in communicating with the future. But will we? In his final chapter [of The Future of the Past, 2003, Farrar, Straus and Girous, author Alexander] Stille confronts us with an irony of hte technological age: the better we become at processing and storing information, the poorer we become at preserving it, because digitized systems tend to become obsolete. Meanwhile, information is increasing much faster than the number of potential users. Unless we envisage a vast growth in the number of historians in future societies, the current rate of accumulation may lead to a glut so paralyzing as to render it useless.
The durability of the stone inscriptions left by the Egyptians and Mayans is measured in millenia. Medieval illuminated parchments have lost little of the their luster in half a millenium. But Stille tells us that new forms of electronic information storage can render previous forms obsolete every three to five years, posing a quandary for administrators. . . .
Eventually science will produce more permanent forms of storage, but in the meantime, what is going to happen? Certainly all information will not be transferred to new storage media every twenty years. The predicament recalls the situation that prevailed through the Dark and Middle Ages when manuscripts were copied by monks. The labor needed to produce a copy served to screen out all but the most beloved and revered works. It might be hard to devise a better system.
-John Terborgh reviews Stille's book in The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2002

Now that's funny

The Third Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference features important sessions such as THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATING IN ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS.

Reporters and editors

Some first rate thinking about how the relationship ought to work between reporters and editors at any news organization is at Poynter Institute's site in a column by Bob Steele.. This relationship is understood poorly enough among professional journalists and I'd be surprised if most consumers of news -- the public that reads and watches our work -- has any idea about its importance.