On the mortality of media

Reflecting on humanity's eternal quest to learn everything, author Alberto Manguel shares some pertinent observations about the wonders and limitations of today's digital archives:

... new technologies need not be exclusionary. The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and no doubt the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader's desk. All we need to do is remember the corollaries to the arguments in favor of a virtual library: that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context; that leafing through a material book or roaming through material shelves is an intimate part of the craft; that the omnipresent electronic technology is still fragile and that, as it changes, we keep losing the possibility of retrieving that which was once stored in now superseded containers. We can still read the words on papyrus ashes saved from the charred ruins of Pompeii; we don't know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed in a 2004 CD. This is not a complaint, just a reminder.