Re: Video on preservation of cultural material

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

The classicist in me rebels -- I just mitigated insomnia by
rereading Plato's Symposium before dawn, a text written 2400
years ago and transmitted to us by handwritten copies for about
1900 of those years, surviving in approximately 99.9% accurate
form.  Yes, ancient history is full of gaps and we make
occasional goofy errors, but it's a constituting fact of our
culture that we've cared about preservation and connection, at
some times more than others, and we've been amazingly successful.
What this charming video assumes is important to underline:  (1)
that digital media are less reliable than analog, less easy to
preserve, and so the likelihood of loss and consequent
propagation of goofy error is much higher; (2) but also that the
scholars pompously orating on the video will exist and will
*care* about popular music of 1000 years earlier.  That seems to
me the real open variable here:  in a waterfall of cultural
products, will we care to preserve *all* the popular music of the
next millennium?  Or much of it?  I can well do without the
Archies and Bobby Goldsboro, to be sure (though I hope some
pedant keeps Napoleon XIV for the ages), but I suspect that even
for the "classics" we will choose to grow more forgetful still --
or rather, just shift our attention away from remembering.  It's
the combination of social inattention *and* media friability that
has the power of great destructiveness in it.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.


On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Joseph Esposito
<espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just stumbled on a hilarious video that makes the case in
> spades for a good preservation policy:
>
> http://bit.ly/g6DAWU
>
> The conceit of the video is how the Beatles will be remembered
> 1,000 years from now. Makes the point with great humor. I just
> posted the link to a private mail group for publishers, who will
> get the point, I think.
>
> Joe Esposito