From an email I got yesterday:
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Malcolm, a commentator I've followed for years, who has pretty good perspective on things, says that in the future this period will be called the information dark age. What he means by this is that most of what is really happening, and people are saying about it, is published electronically and then disappears in a few years when somebody flushes the web site hard disk to make room for current information and for information that is more effective in paying for the operating cost of the web site.

Another part of the problem is that its so easy to post an additional web page, that the filtering and condensing process that went on for printed information, that cost a lot per page to produce, doesn't happen for digital information, so there is tons more stuff of a fairly low grade and value, and so there is even less incentive to archive and save it. This junk page bloat raises the cost of web site overhead and increases the need to dump some of the stuff. Its extremely unlikely the web site admin will do the editing condensing work the editors failed to do, so like a dump truck driver they pull the big lever and dump all of the stuff older than a certain date.

In 40 years, when people are trying to figure out what was happening at the turn of the century, and why people were behaving in such insane ways, most of the raw data won't exist anymore because it never entered printed on paper format, and wasn't ever archived anywhere in a permanent format.

Worse than this, its far harder to tell when history is being rewritten when its all in digital format, and you don't own a local copy of your own for reference like you do for print material that is important to your life. I don't think our civilization has the sophistication and wisdom to cope successfully with many of the technologies that have become common place in the last 20 years.

So I vote with my dollars and support paper printing when I can.
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This makes sense to me.
F

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"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

Malcolm, a commentator you have followed for years, is apparently unaware of The Wayback Machine, which archives periodical snapshots of web sites.

"As of 2009 the Wayback Machine contained about 3 petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes per month."

It is true that it may not capture every change from every web site. Even so, don't bet on it, or even on the possibility that some teenager in Butte, Montana with an interest in politics may have copied the money quote onto his Facebook page.

Furthermore, it's not like the important stuff isn't still recorded and printed and re-recorded.

As he points out himself, low grade stuff is what will be destroyed, overwhelmingly. "Why people were behaving in insane ways" is a bit of a loaded question but it can still be answered...

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True, but there's also the matter of personal correspondance. In the past everyone literate would leave behind masses of letters and diaries, which'd get made up into books if the person was in any way notable. Not only do modern communications not get stored, they're far easier to write than paper letters and so have much less thought put into them. Even if they were kept on file, who would ever want to read, say, The Collected E-mails of Barrack Obama?

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Good point.

But, otoh, after reading "Le Secret du Roi" by Gilles Perrault, entirely done thanks to the preserved secret correspondence between Louis XV and the Comte de Broglie (and the agents of said 'Secret'), it still works best if someone else compile the damn thing and give you the substance...

That being said, it's a 3 books affair and the weakest one is the last one - in part, I guess Mr. Perrault was getting tired of his subject and also because there seems to have a lot less letters between de Broglie and Louis XVI... thus diminishing the amount of raw material available. Too bad as this is the book exploring the one success of 'Le Secret' i.e. getting the American Revolution to work out and finally pay back the British for stealing the whole world from us.

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Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.