cyberspace on sites/services like WoW and Second Life.
The part of all this that I find fascinating is the capacity we now have for living in a cyber world, where our environment is completely under our control and the normal limitations of space and logistics, in terms of interacting with people and what we can save for posterity, do not exist. Within reason, there is no real limit to the things we can save for future generations in the digital world. Unlike in the real world, there is no limited land, no worry of flooding, no fires or earthquakes. When something is created in the digital world, it lasts forever unless someone chooses to delete it, or the real world is so rude as to intrude by destroying a physical component to the system with one of the aforementioned disasters.
I believe that there are few things we do of lasting importance in life. A large part of most people's energy, every day, is spent just staying fed and warm (if they're lucky). These are practical pursuits, but in the end, they are just subsistence. What truly makes us unique among all the life in this world (if anything)? To me, it is the things we contribute that last beyond us. The accomplishments we complete, the children we have. Before now, even the greatest of accomplishments became anonymous after a long enough time. The cyberworld allows us, for the first time, however, to save a personal record on virtually everyone who wishes to do so.
One of the most interesting (and often necessary) things to do when joining a new organization is to sit down and start going through all the random directories and drives I have access to to find out how they do business. It is interesting the things you find. In my last squadron (the 39th), I was cleaning out all my old files and work and started doing some digging. I found a bunch of old documents in the pilot flight directory. I found a bunch of documents from July, August and early September 2001, dealing with things like airshows, stateside missions, quarterly awards. Then there was nothing until mid-October, when all I could find were deployment crew lists. The squadron was still on that deployment when I joined them in Manas in June of 2003.
Future historians will need to become adept at looking a digital documents, just as current historians examine physical documents. I doubt that anyone yet teaches a class on digital history, but I am trying to become one myself. It has become a hobby of mine to find ways to organize and save files on virtually everything I can find. It is an interesting challenge; the sheer amount of information out there is the greatest obstacle (this is the other side to the two-edged sword of the ease of document creation and retention we now enjoy).
An interesting manifestation of this shift to the digital realm is my automatic document feed scanner, which basically works like a printer in reverse. Now, a document isn't really secure until you have a digital copy.
tags: history, email, geek
[edit same day: carriage returns]
3 comments:
Sorry, apparently I don't know how to work a computer--hence having to delete my first comment. That's all the more embarrassing because I'm about to talk about my job at a software company...
Anyway, I was going to note that one of the interesting parts of medical software is that while we want to preserve nearly everything as part of the medical record... there are obviously things that we don't want to be permanent. In the paper world, doctors/nurses often put a sticky note on a chart with a comment like "Hypochondriac" or "Narcotics addict" or possibly something more minor. But in the event of a malpractice suit, those post-it notes would be long gone. It's difficult to recreate that in a digital way but it's one of the few pieces of information we don't want to keep forever.
Moreover, some of the information that IS kept can come back to cause problems. For instance, fetal heart rates are routinely monitored during labor and delivery but wide fluctuations are normal... however, if something goes wrong, during a malpractice suit, it's all too easy to point to the fetal heart rate data and say, "Look, the heart rate fell significantly here and stayed low; why didn't you do anything about that until it was too late?"
Anyway, I guess I just think its interesting that now that we have the means to save EVERYTHING (the last hospital I was at had nurses scan in the doctors' handwritten order in addition to placing them electronically), people are beginning to realize just how permanent digital records can be, and beginning to draw some lines about what should be kept forever and how the things that we DON'T want to keep should be removed permanently.
(Also, I don't know if this comment is linked to me in any way other than my first name, but I'm hoping it's not... my company is intensely concerned about confidentiality.)
First things last: No, I don't think this is linked to anything other than your name. All it says when I click you name is that your profile is private (annoying btw). (Interesting note, my company is also intensely interested in confidentiality, and has also been known to omit certain disadvantageous facts at time.)
Your comment highlights yet another need for tort reform. The negative emotions of fear and greed pushing for the omission or destruction of information that, objectively speaking, can do nothing but be useful in the medical world.
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