Digital self-erasure

[Anonymous]

The vulnerability of the digital was brought home when Sapiencia.eu temporarily disappeared. All that writing. All that work. Gone, just like that. Not just mine, but all the other writers too.
And so it is across the internet as a whole. Work can just disappear.
Books and pen and ink require destruction by fire or water. Digital work, be it that of years, just takes the press of a button. No more centuries of passed-down creativity, writing, art. The closing of an online acciount ends everything!

And when Facebook and Google are lost in oblivion, we will still have Dickens, Hardy, Plato and Voltaire … providing we didn’t toss out all the printed books! Trouble is, they are already being tossed and pulped. We are embracing our own erasure.

 

[DJP]

All is not lost:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200220190257/https://sapiencia.eu/

[ALB]

Maybe but stuff is retrievable. Also you are forgetting that the internet provides wide access to the content of the books you value. For instance there’s the Gutenberg Project:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg

This allows people to read books they would otherwise find difficult to get hold of in book form.

I am sure they will all be backed-up somewhere.

The Internet is a great invention. Of course under capitalism it’s full of crap (adverts and scams not to mention ravings of the likes of David Icke) but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

[Bijou Drains]

What they are finding in my line of work is records made in digital are starting to decay and there is starting to be a problem with stuff that was stored digitally at the begining of the digital age, where the computer system used is now unavailable, Windows 1 was made obsolete 20 odd years ago, etc.

The Egyptians wrote on papyrus, some of which is still readible.

[Anonymous]

At the moment I see us not being given the option but to meekly put up with the digital replacing everything, with those who don’t like it having to lump it and most people shouting hurrah.

[Anonymous]

The real and tangible will be the preserve of the rich, including books. The majority will have merely the virtual.

[Bijou Drains]

I think books will be like music, yougsters are returning to vinyl

[Anonymous]

<p dir=”ltr”>William Morris would proverbially turn in his grave to see books being thrown into rubbish skips, to be replaced with gadgets. If the capitalism of his day was ugly enough to his mind, that of the age of the gadget is the final victory of the ugly over the beautiful, of the crass and bland over everything Morris stood for and loved.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>To see books, loved by individuals of all ages over generations, thrown away (as was seen recently in my locality, as an old bookshop closes, to be replaced by a mobile phone store), is like the mockery of the illiterate bully at school and in the workplace, ridiculing a “bookworm.” To see books viewed as no more than their text, so that a digital screen suffices for everyone’s mental needs, may be the view of many here as elsewhere, but it is the negation of Morris, Wilde, and of the love of the tangible, the real and the close that books represented for many, many children and adults who have known their wonder.</p>

[Anonymous]

I’m not against digital per se. It is useful.
I’m against its assertion of dominance, entailing the vanishing of other, real and tangibles sources of joy.
I want the digital to abandon hegemony. To stop replacing. Instead, to coexist, democratically – and if socialists don’t agree with me on this, then they are, well, wrong.

[Anonymous]

Visitors tell me they can’t wait to see a classic film.

I make the tea, and we settle in for the film. They tell me they have always wanted to see it.

I press “play” on the DVD player, and immediately, every time, their mobiles are whipped out and they are frenziedly playing “zombie wars” or “candy crush.”

All contact between us, togetherness, interaction, ceases. They are glued; oblivious. And there is no longer awareness of their surroundings. It is not the reading of a book, where one looks up when a friend enters. The digital distraction is frenzied, frenetic. It is hypnosis.

The film ends, and they say, “Oh no. We missed it.”

This happens every time.

They are in a state of perpetual agitation and inattentiveness.

These and their children are the new Shelleys, Godwins, Morrises, Marxes and Engleses; the new hope for socialism?

[Anonymous]

ALB wrote:

It doesn’t follow that finding mobile phones
useful, indeed very useful, means that you don’t
value the things you list.
… come to think
of it, what would lockdown be like for personal
interaction without the internet? Lucky it got
invented as there’d be virtually none.

I agree 100%. The only thing is that, as i’ve said, the tangible things are disappearing.
I rely on the internet for obtaining old hardback books, of course, but the joy of browsing has gone, at least in my town.
I grew up during the golden age of comics. They’ve all gone, unless one pays a fortune for them on the internet. Children today only know characters through a computer screen.
I foresee books becoming scarcer, traded among the rich and cornered by booksellers, while the rest of us look through a screen or put up with shabby, text-only, print-on-demand non-books.
No more leisurely appreciation of music or film, but tiny things stuck in our ears or straining our eyes through a mobile screen.
Of course, socialism would be the solution, because the means of production would belong to all. Those who want this kind of thing can have it, those who want the tangible and real can have that too. Socialism will restore option, and restore leisure. No more need to rush about to one knows not where.

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Regard mobile phones, it won’t be our generation
that will either benefit or suffer but those
growing up with such technology which will
determine if they are boom or a bind upon society.
People our age are adopting it, perhaps adapting 
<i>bit to them, but not fully evolving with the
technology. Just watch a youngster’s finger-action
when texting…

Schools no longer teach longhand. The young don’t know the word longhand. When they do use a pen, they don’t hold it as we did or do. They print the letters. Alright for communication, but what about the beauty and the art that is handwriting?

[rodshaw]

I have an ambivalent attitude towards books. They are great to browse and the comfort in their tangibility is unquestionable. There are books I’ve had for over 50 years that I wouldn’t part with for the world.

Some children’s picture books are superb (though I’m not too sure about the constant diet of monsters, ghosts and goblins).

However, with most books, you read them once, or maybe twice, and then they sit on a shelf for decades gathering dust. And they are heavy – if you have any number of them, they are no joke when you move house.

It’s far too simplistic to say that schools no longer teach longhand. Though I doubt that my grandkids will ever be as fond of calligraphy as I am (how many people, even of my generation, are?), they are learning ‘joined-up writing’ at primary school and, though it may not be as common as it once was, I’m sure many schools still teach it.

As far as spreading the socialist message is concerned, any medium will do, the more effective the better.

[Anonymous]

Would you be content with bibliophiles and others like me just having to “lump it, if we don’t like it”?

Or do you sympathise?

I’m in the minority, I know. Wouldn’t Morris be too? Is there any longer a place in the way we imagine the future for his aesthetics as well as his socialism? Or is that image now hordes of people glued hypnotically to screens?

[alanjjohnstone]

I have a Kindle but it just has not the same feeling as a real book.

It’s also one of the arguments I have heard against the case for ending the hard-copy print edition of the Socialist Standard and going for the online E-zine version.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by alanjjohnstone.

[Anonymous]

And what would you feel when you no longer have the option of handling a real book and are just stuck with the e-non-book? Will you be content to “lump it”?

[Author]

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