Processing Post

If we are to learn form history, making an important work accessible would promise a longer life. Plato’s Dialogues that lured the average literate Athenian outlives his technical and much less popular works. Regarding Classical Chinese, many essays by high level officials were lost, but a entry-level collection called Guwen Guzhi (the Finest of Ancient Prose), edited by two intellectuals in a small village in the south three hundred years ago has become one of the most widely distributed selections.

Although many classics have been preserved, most of art and artists faded. Cryptology dates back to when humans needed to send long distance messages for the first time, but only the most extraordinary techniques have left imprints to us today. When an old image is presented to me, it may also remind me of the majority of memories around the same event that were no long available.

Speaking of actual storage methods, I thought floppy disks were fascinating when I first used one, and envisioned storing some important and secretive messages in it. It seems challenging to specifically preserve a corpus of information. The SFF works I’ve read haven’t provided much fresh thinking. The stories depicts encoding text into the surface of a planet or sending a living human brain to aliens for an exchange of intelligence. Those futuristic novels rather demonstrate exploring than archiving.

One Reply

  • Thanks, Ding. I like this idea of thinking about “what gets preserved” through a means of natural, cultural, selection. And I’d love to hear more about SF fantasies of the future archive!

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