When you snap a
picture with your cellphone or digital camera, what do you do with it? Do you still have it “developed”? When your company asks for a report, do you
still print it out or would it exist only in some computer or backed up in
Dropbox or some cloud storage? When
you read a book, “do you read it off the screen just like everyone else” or do
you still flip through pages like they did in days of old?
Argentine Humanist Alberto Manguel had
this to say:
Even the newer
electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original
publication. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space,
its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the
ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific
meanings that lend tone and context to the words. (Columbia University’s
librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books,
disagreed with this notion. “The value,” she wrote, “in intellectual terms, of
the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily
established.” There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual
or any other terms, to the experience of reading.)
But above all, the
argument that calls for electronic reproduction on account of the endangered
life of paper is a false one. Anybody who has used a computer knows how easy it
is to lose a text on the screen, to come upon a faulty disk or CD, to have the
hard drive crash beyond all appeal. The tools of the electronic media are not
immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In
1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based,
multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of
England compiled by Norman monks.
More ambitious than
its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names,
25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving
pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded “life in Britain” during that
year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on
twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC
microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read
the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The
attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none
was entirely successful. “There is currently no demonstrably viable technical
solution to this problem,” said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of
the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. “Yet, if it is not
solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost.” By contrast, the original Domesday Book,
almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public
Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable.
The director for
the electronic records archive program at the National Archives and Records
Administration of the United States confessed in November 2004 that the preservation
of electronic material, even for the next decade, let alone for eternity, “is a
global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the
way down to individuals.” Since no clear solution is available, electronic
experts recommend that users copy their materials onto CDs, but even these are
of short duration. The lifespan of data recorded on a CD with a CD burner could
be as little as five years. In fact, we don’t know for how long it will be
possible to read a text inscribed on a 2004 CD. And while it is true that acidity
and brittleness, fire and the legendary bookworms threaten ancient codexes and
scrolls, not everything written or printed on parchment or paper is condemned
to an early grave. A few years ago, in the Archeological Museum of Naples, I
saw, held between two plates of glass, the ashes of a papyrus rescued from the
ruins of Pompeii. It was two thousand years old; it had been burnt by the fires
of Vesuvius, it had been buried under a flow of lava—and I could still read the
letters written on it, with astonishing clarity. (footnotes omitted)
Manuscripts and typescript drafts can
easily be read if they are found. You
will also be able to find a wealth of meaning by examining various versions of
the manuscript versus the published version.
But the ephemeral
nature of electronic word processing makes it difficult to find the same
level of textual analysis from authors. With
the advent of electronic composition and storage of books is the elimination and
disappearance of drafts. In the past, an
author would make a series of drafts before coming up with a final
manuscript. Historians, hagiographers,
biographers and other academics would find these drafts a very rich source of
what the author was trying to write and what he was trying to say. Remember José Rizal's lost chapter in the
Noli Me Tangere, a chapter thatwas later included in some critical
editions. Jefferson's drafts of the
declaration of liberty have been examined over and over again by historians and
political scientists seeking to “get into Jefferson's brain.” In this blog, I have an ongoing project to
write a study guide of Los Pájaros de Fuego, the “lost novel” of José
Balmori, is based on the critical edition of Isaac Donoso which contains
glosses of previous drafts of the novel.
There are legal
implications as well. In the Philippine
setting, legal instruments are, without exception, paper documents. For example, there is no such thing as a “video
will”. In other legal traditions, we
have the UK Parliament, where a law is only
formally passed once it is printed in parchment. Indeed, the durability of parchment and ink
and paper and ink is not something we can easily replicate with the electronic
medium.
What is the legal
status therefore, of so called “electronic titles”? Of late, the Land Registation Authority (LRA)
has been digitizing the land records of our country. Basically, all physical titles on file with
the LRA are scanned and kept in a server somewhere in Scandinavia.1 A law professor discussed that these
electronic titles have no legal status.
The only title to land in the Philippines is the physical certificate of
title on file with the LRA, and thus the title can still be physically
destroyed and the scanned copy on file somewhere in Norway cannot simply
replace the physical title.
Imagine also if
something were to happen to the hard drive in Norway, and everything up in the
cloud were to suddenly disappear—all of the precious digital-only land title
system would be in complete disarray.
People had a big row if Facebook or Instagram would suddenly go down and
all of their precious pictures and memories with it, how much more the
indefeasibility of a person’s ownership of a parcel of land?
The Feared Blue Screen of Death
What do you guys
think? Paper or electronic?
Footnotes:
[1] This is just an
example, but many servers are located in Scandinavia to take advantage of cold
weather to save on airconditioning costs.
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