LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,763
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
True. But if the power goes out, do you really need the stuff on the web to survive?
Well, there were places near here that lost power for a week due to the ice storm just before Christmas, and I'm sure there were some near-fatal cases of Facebook withdrawal.
In all seriousness, though, what worries me is the vulnerability of material that's being stored only in digital formats. I was doing some genealogical research recently and wanted to get a look at some documents concerning one of my great-grandfathers, only to find out that the particular file I needed is not available because it was stored on a digital format that can no longer be read, and the original documents were destroyed.
This kind of mentality -- we've got diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigital, so who needs to keep all this awful paaaaaaaperrrrr -- is going to be the death of civilization if we're not careful. And I have no doubt that we won't be careful.