Film gets the last laugh, for now...
The Digital Dilemma- a report by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences- brings some new perspective on film vs. digital debate. In the end we may have to go back to film as a way to preserve, or at least until silicon valley makes a breakthrough. Read the NY times article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html
Interesting to me is the expensive cost analysis. The digital medium still liberates the artist in it's low cost, easy access. But what happens to the history? The millions of hours of video this generation is documenting, yet only those with the means to a seemingly endless bank account of funds could afford to preserve that documentation. Think about a great documentary you saw, something that exposed the truth or inspired. If it was digital will that work be included in the catalog of wealthy film archivists that select the "worthy"? Beware our history could be re-written much more easier than we ever imagined. To be continued...
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yeah but
Well, this is how it's always been since the beginning of humanity. The rich get remembered, the poor don't. History gets told by the rich and the conquerors, since history began. There used to be oral tradition, which was a way for everyday people to pass on knowledge, wisdom, and stories, but ironically that is being destroyed by the much more ephemeral new media technologies, which more and more let anyone create stuff, but disintegrates and gets forgotten in time.
I often think about how everything i've done creatively for all my adult life, for the most part, is encoded digitally on chunks of plastic and metal that will be gone or at least unreadable in a century at most, unless i'm somehow very lucky to get famous and people painstakingly preserve it. If there's even a civilization in 100 years that can.
But then I usually decide, who cares? It's kind of good stuff gets forgotten. See Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants'," which is sort of about copyright but also more general about the advantages of forgetting...
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html