Expanding Freaked Out by Electrons - a Guest Blog

Boy, do I have smart friends.  This dude is one of the smartest, and I've known him since he was Drake's college roommate our sophomore year at OU.  Back in those days, Dale, the only guy I knew from Kingfisher, Oklahoma, drove an MG, and drank REAL (and for our college incomes EXPENSIVE) hooch.   He left Oklahoma with an engineering degree in metallurgy, but that was only the start.  He has a master's

Drake and Dale, 1972 - practicing those 'get a job' handshakes

from somewhere I don't remember, spent over ten years swashbuckling around the world while being a gainfully employed ex-pat in Saudi before, during and after the first Gulf war.  (You should hear him talk about that experience.)  THEN, he landed in Cambridge where he got a PhD.  Now he's settled in Bartelsville, OK raising a family and coping with eldercare problems just like the rest of us.  Sigh...  Anyway, here's another angle of his about  the Electronic Revolution swirling around us which he was gracious enough to share.

There is a lot of new knowledge zipping around as 

electrons in the ether these days.

But there is a lot of old knowledge that is going to be lost.

You have probably read about the great winnowing of knowledge that took place 

when people changed from scrolls to bound books. The monks who copied the old 

manuscripts picked and chose which ones were worth their trouble and the cost of 

the vellum. Hundreds of old Greek and Roman manuscripts were lost forever, 

crumbled into dust as the scrolls decayed, many now known only by reputation.

Something similar, although less drastic, happened when Gutenberg started 

the movable type revolution. Not all those gilt-edged illuminated hand-

lettered manuscripts got into print.  Some of those old rare books survived dusty old 

libraries in Oxford, Cambridge and the Italian universities. Many did not. 

I fear the digital revolution will create another great winnowing of knowledge. Not 

everything is going to be scanned and digitized. And some of what is digitized will 

become unreadable as electronic storage devices change. (When was the last time 

you read something off of a 5-1/2 inch floppy? Or even a 3-1/4 inch "hard" disk? I 

have files from the 90's that it would take a CIA cryptographer to decipher). 

And how permanent are the latest electronic storage systems? Is the tightening spiral

 of obsolescence played out? Or is there more to come. And if so, what will we lose of

 our last 20 years of literature? 

Interesting thoughts, no?