I took the family to Washington DC last week to visit the museums and teach our six year old a bit of history. On the tour of the Capital building it really struck me how much history is preserved there and how much respect our founding fathers gave to the preservation of history, and historical items.
That made me wonder: What is our generation leaving behind? Is our media driven society so worried about producing the next new thing that we are not leaving any meaningful record of our existence? There is no doubt that we will leave a heck of a lot of images and data behind, but I have a feeling that it will certainly be a case of quantity over quality.
In most places around DC you don’t see history preserved in photographs (they didn’t exist in the 18th century). You see oil paintings, huge ones, and marble and bronze statues. History preserved in materials that will be around for a really long time and not the silly little silver discs (DVDs) that so many of us are putting trust in to keep our personal histories.
Feel free to join the discussion. I can’t be accused of being anti technology. I live and breathe it. I also think that film is potentially as delicate a medium as a DVD, you have both climate control issues and technology obsolescence issues. With oil paintings and statues you do have to keep them out of the elements for them to last, but they are not dependent on any machinery to view. You just go look at them.
Who uses DVD’s anymore?
Store everything on hard drives!