When I saw this, I assumed that this was a link to a recent editorial
column noting how vulnerable our current digital repositories of
"knowledge" are to the vicissitudes of computer systems and storage
technologies.
However I see it goes off in another direction that I find hard to
follow.
What's more easy to confirm is that we're going through an information
"unconformity."
Here I'm borrowing a geological term for what happens when you can see a
continuous record up to a certain point, but then there's a gap until a
new record is laid down in stone.
If you've ever tried to contribute to Wikipedia on a topic that you know
something about, you'll know that they generally don't accept references
to books or academic journals that have been printed, but are not
electronically available. I know professional historians who have had
their contributions rejected because they relied too much on books that
were only available in old-fashioned libraries, or on microfiche.
Similarly among birders, we frequently see people cite eBird records as
if there were no prior information from field notes and other published
compilations. This was one reason why I put together my recent
compilation of White-tailed Kite reports for the mid-Willamette Valley.
A person with whom I'd been discussing this with had done their best to
research the topic via eBird, but that only turned up a high count of 7
kites for Benton County (by Greg Gillson, sometime back in the 1970s).
Not the count of 28 which was reported both in the local Audubon field
notes and in Birds of Oregon: A General Reference.
Looking back in history, the most similar "information unconformity"
might be the loss of oral traditions that occurred with the onset of the
written word.
Certainly the new media create the possibility to create a vast record
of new information. Some older information may be brought forward into
the new media when manuscripts are scanned or otherwise "digitized,"
just as a few old oral-formulaic masterpieces like the Odyssey and
Beowulf were preserved by scribes.
But with both of these "information unconformities," a vast amount of
information has been (or is being) lost. Which means that we're already
in sort of a mini-dark-age.
Joel
On Wed, 2018-02-28 at 13:22 -0800, Harry Fuller wrote:
https://veblen21.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/is-tech-ushering-in-the-next-dark-ages/
--
Harry Fuller
author of: San Francisco's Natural History: Sand Dunes to Streetcars:
https://ecowise.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/sfnh/
author of Great Gray Owls of CA-OR-WA:
https://ecowise.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/the-great-gray-owl-book/
author of Freeway Birding: freewaybirding.com
birding website: http://www.towhee.net
my birding blog: atowhee.wordpress.com
