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Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Blog Triumphalism, Redux.
Hi y’all. Holbo and Kaufman and Singh, bloggy friends all, asked me at the MLA why I wasn’t posting at the Valve? “No one’s asked me to,” I said. “We didn’t think you’d be interested,” they replied. Since I’m all about writing as much as possible that isn’t “real” academic writing, I berated them for their (lack of?) presumption, told them they were all sexist, and made them sign me up for a stint as a guest poster.
It’s possible some of you reading this may know me under a different name, but for the sake of intellectual coherence--an author-function is not the same thing as a writer, as we all know--I, Tedra Osell, am not that other person, and we shan’t talk about her. Until and unless I decide to address the author-function issue, which will probably happen sooner rather than later, since poking at murky water to see what comes up is a favorite occupation of mine.
We’ll see if anyone wants me to stick around after an introduction like that. To start with, though, a tame, but interesting, news item.
Apparently the oldest title still in (continuous) circulation has just left off printing entirely, becoming a purely online publication. I don’t read Swedish, so I can’t decipher a word of the thing, although “logga in” is both obvious and, to anglophone ears, funny.
Poor Hans Holm, the paper’s editor for twenty years, thinks it’s “a cultural disaster.” I think it’s fabulous. A readership of a thousand people was huge three hundred years ago; now it’s miniscule by newspaper standards. If the most important effect of print culture was its democratizing potential (answer: yes), then online publication--cheap, self-archiving, and available worldwide--expands the project exponentially.
I’ma cross-post this at The Long 18th.
Comments
You do know that besides founding the newspaper, Queen Kristina killed Descartes, don’t you?
And what kind of name is Tedra, anyway?
"Self-archiving” is always a question, though. I’d guess that in twenty years, it may be a lot easier to find the last paper copies of Post-och Inrikes Tidningar than it will be to find their first Web versions.
Rich, agreed; the problem of continued technological access is an open question. On the other hand, html is merely another language (like all programming languages); if we lose the ability to read Swedish, the papers’ content is lost to us as surely as if we lose the ability to ‘read’ html.
John, it’s a dirty hippie name.
I was poking around in the Dead Media Project, looking for some dimly remembered Internet archiving story, and found the following Bruce Sterling quote:
“Why *should* the Internet become a ‘serious publishing system?’ Who will give way first? Will the Internet somehow become a scholarly archive, or will scholarly archives become troves of uncatalogable spam and gibberish?”
In any case, the short-term problem isn’t so much people forgetting HTML—there are already some early markup systems that have gone dead, but HTML is widespread enough so it seems unlikely—but that if no one pays for disk drives and bandwidth, things on the Internet go away, while paper just sits there. Who knows what the chances of the Wayback Machine going down are, over any particular period of time—the way that the Internet makes it possible to centralize the service so that there’s one main archiver may make it paradoxically more vulnerable.
Anyway, enough cranky-librarian stuff; the archiving concern certainly doesn’t outweigh the rest of the good things.
You are the resident freelance librarian, after all.
if no one pays for disk drives and bandwidth, things on the Internet go away, while paper just sits there.
The flip side of this (and I’m just arguing for the sake of doing so--I’m a fan of paper archives myself. Although that’s largely because reproducing paper through microfilming or whatever doesn’t do a decent job, whereas things written expressly for online publication, that’s not an issue) is the cost of storage. Paper sits there, but it does need to sit somewhere reasonably dry and windproof.
Also, welcome to the Valve! Enjoy the hatred soon to be ladled upon you by stranger and friend alike. (First comes the criticism, then the <a href=http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/02/leaky_pipes_and.html#comment-28720863">self-congratulatory encouragement</a>, then the...well, at that point, the annoyance, but that’ll pretty much be all yours.)
That said though, noted: post sometime about the archive issue. That’ll surely be the most popular post on the internets, EVAH.
Does the ToS know about this happy event.
Ah, the smell of revisionism in the morning. The truth is, I only invited her because I THOUGHT she said the Valve was SEXY.
The paper/bandwidth distinction may seem to shoot Hawthorne as <a href="http://citizense.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-would-hawthorne-say-about-gender.html">blogger arguments to pieces, but as any good comic collector knows, and as Hawthorne bemoans in “The Custom-House” (and as Hawthorne scholars who curse his friends for burning his letters to them bemoan), paper ain’t permanent. Were the Maya Codexes on paper? They burned, either way. What archiving means in a digital medium is the subject of “serious scholarly inquiry,” as they say. But why talk about that when we could talk about Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead! I vote for the latter--especially b/c the former is well outside any of my specialties and I’m no longer plugged into personal networks with those for who it is--unless of course those in the former care to share.
John, shut your mouth.
Scott, I have Officially Promised Not To Be a Bitch.
Paper isn’t permanent, but some of any kind of widely scattered physical storage medium always survives. There are still something like 600 quipu left, after all. Which means that the most likely longest-lived thing to survive from our digital era, assuming some high-tech way of recovering the magnetic domains, is a disk copy of America Online. I’d put money on that over the Hubbard lectures, which clearly some schismatics are going to dig up and destroy in a few centuries, or the Voyager Golden Record, which no one is going to be able to find.
Tedra, welcome! This answers an age-old question: where do we go on the Web for legal announcements by corporations, courts and certain government agencies? I put it on my RSS feeder, wondering what Queen Kristina would have thought, but over 1,500 such announcements a day proved even harder to manage than “Overheard In New York”.
Don’t talk to Holbo that way, Miss Tedra.
I guess I’ll just repeat my usual computer sermon here: why doesn’t the IT world care about stability and reliability? Why don’t safe ways of storing data have a high priority on the industry’s to-do list? Why has every single goddamn highly-caffeinated can-do go-getter tech person I have ever asked explained “Computers are very complicated and have mechanical parts” when I asked them why their trillion-dollar industry can’t store data safely at any level, not even the Google level?
Toyota Computer. The non-General Motors computer. The computer that works. The computer that you can rely on. The computer of the future. The computer of the very far future. The computer of the after-we’re-all-dead future.
That Descartes thing always pissed me off. When they have time travel, I’m going back in time and killing Queen Kristina, not Hitler.
I was speaking to you, oh he who summons those who should not be summoned. Mr. Emerson.
Tedra, as long as my power to call spirits from the vasty deep is treated with due respect, I’m easy to get along ith.
All I know is if he shows up, I’m so going to give him your address.
T., he’s a regular on my site by now. He’s often quite interesting, but then he goes off on tangents.
It’s a sacrifice I make for the rest of you. That, and I’m befriending him in case someday I need him to take someone out.
You mean my home address? Small Minnesota towns are very hard to infiltrate, and who would want to?
But, Walt, then we wouldn’t have had the Garbo movie. Anyway, it’s just a story that teachers tell students. Cold weather and getting up early won’t actually kill you, even if it sometimes feels like they might.
That’s what they’d have you believe, Walt. Descartes died of sexual exhaustion.
I mean Mike.
Tedra, Valkommen.
(See, we all just learned another word in Swedish)
Welcome to side six. Follow along in your books, and repeat after me, as we learn three new words in Turkish: Coffee. Delight. Border. May I see your passport, please?
Having worked in the marketing division of a large computer company, I feel fairly confident that the answer to the question, “why doesn’t the IT world care about stability and reliability?" is that those things aren’t sexy, and don’t sell like hotcakes. High-end computing sales (which we know drives production) is all about looking forward to the next big thing, and reliable storage, while surely the most important issue in high-end computing, is the least sexy, and therefore the hardest to get tech-ignorant CIOs (which is not all of them, of course) willing to shell out the big bucks for.
So we’re left debating the scholarly implications of flammable paper versus erasable code.
And I’ve just realized I’m responding to a long-since cold thread, so now I will say Hey to Tedra, and go on my way.
The Valve:
This is a wonderful site. Very classy. With some brains to it. I found it while pursuing “three new words in Turkish.” Long live the Firesign Theatre. By the way, the Firesign Theatre used to have a radio show on KPFK FM, a Pacifica station out of LA. Also, Steve G had a 2-human show, for a short time, with his significant other(?) on KPFK. They went by very strange nom-de-radio’s. And local theatres ran Firesign shows sometimes. Does anybody have copies of the KPFK radio shows, the 2-human shows, or the Firesign Theatre plays?
Viva Nick Danger!
I’ll have a few comments on preserving paper later.
OOOPS! Correction
The Valve:
This is a wonderful site. Very classy. With some brains to it. I found it while pursuing “three new words in Turkish.” Long live the Firesign Theatre. By the way, the Firesign Theatre used to have a radio show on KPFK FM, a Pacifica station out of LA. Also, Steve G {OOPS!! Should be Peter Bergman} had a 2-human show, for a short time, with his significant other(?) on KPFK. They went by very strange nom-de-radio’s. And local theatres ran Firesign shows sometimes. Does anybody have copies of the KPFK radio shows, the 2-human shows, or the Firesign Theatre plays?
Viva Nick Danger!
I’ll have a few comments on preserving paper later.