Will Digital Adoption Erase our Historical Records?
I just finished watching this video on the future of magazines, which caused me to think about something that has concerned me for awhile. Despite the fact that the future magazine concept displayed by this video is visually stunning, useful, and all around cool; I am concerned that the digitizing of media will result in the dissolution of public historical records and open the door for censorship. Now, I know this may sound crazy and it is entirely theoretical, but bare with me and you’ll see what I’m saying.
We are already seeing this take place in our news now that the majority of our news resides on the web. Currently, if a reporter files a story with an error, and the error is brought to the reporter or editor’s attention, the publication will just change it in real time with no record of this change available to the reader. This is great for changing errors, but what happens when people start changing past articles to incorporate new facts and bias; or even worse, what happens when people start deleting articles entirely? Where do we go to find them — I can guarantee they wont be on microfiche at our local libraries.
Now, you are probably thinking that this could never happen, but in July of 2009, Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from its customer’s Kindles without warning (story here.) While Bezos issued an apology after the fact, the fact of the matter is Amazon initially thought this was a permissible course of action. It is also important to note that what Amazon did was not illegal, just poor customer service. What this tells us is we have no control over the digital files we purchase. Check out your iTunes agreement, these files are generally licensed to us not sold to us, therefore we do not own them.
This means that these files can be changed or edited at anytime without our knowledge and for the most part, we wont even notice. If you think this isn’t going to happen, just remember what George Lucas did to the original Star Wars movies. Sure, we can still access the originals without any of the extra scenes but only because fans bought them before Lucas made changes. Try buying the original versions on DVD or Blu-ray. You can’t. And, what if this happened 5 years from now when all files are digital? Lucas Film would just replace our downloaded copies with new copies and we would never know the difference.
Where this really scares me is Apple’s plan to revolutionize education through making textbooks available in the Apple marketplace for viewing on the iPad. What happens when we have no historical record of the information we, as a society, are being taught? I can see how it will play out now, every textbook we buy will automatically be replaced by Textbook version 2.0, 3.0 and so forth with no record of the original book we downloaded. In the future, we will be forced to upgrade our knowledge base.
I don’t like the idea of our media (which encompasses our art, news, expression, history, etc.) sitting in the hands of a few companies: Google, Amazon, Apple. For the first time in human history, all the information regarding our history is going to reside in digital formats. As we transition further and further away from analog and become digital consumers, what will happen to our historical record? Who will own it? I can guarantee the individual wont, and do you trust the entities that will?
Anyway, all food for thought. Don’t throw out your history books just yet.
