radbirds

[radbirds]

The Age of the Digital Archivist

As has been said many times, information is power. To hold power over the flow of information and its access is to control the knowledge and thoughts of humanity. In a day and age where we have seen the internet come to rise it has often been said that we have all knowledge world’s at our fingertips yet this reality is a more fragile one than we have been taught. For just as information of the past could be lost as pages and paper succumbed to the centuries and the languages and scripts of words once written were lost from memory, the constraint of physical media were their materials. It is a fallacy of old the hubris to think your own methods are infallible that they would not come to the same fate as those past, this is the same trap of history we of the digital age have fallen into again. As of late our books held up in digital libraries were not our own as we thought when we bought them but were the companies that we merely were lent for a time that could be taken away not truly our own property but trapped only accessible in the companies own vaulted library. Our stories told in moving pictures of charters we have come to love once in our possession on mirror discs that took us to other worlds or wound in cables to watch locked on magnetic tapes now are trapped in streaming services the memories of our past our movies, cultures, shows, and videos of childhood put away with a false promise of being available for only a monthly price no longer do we own that which we consume and no longer do we choose our own libraries but rather companies choose them for us the information we desire to have can be taken away in a moment because someone decides it was not profitable to show and we were not given a chance to purchase it for our own libraries. 

The warnings of those who we said were stuck in the past who warned that books would be banned from places of education and knowledge again we did not heed these warnings but instead went against them. And now they days of ownership of one's libraries and knowledge has gone books held in libraries of kindles to be taken away when the company pleases, movies and shows to disappear when a streaming service decides their time has come and gone, and the tools of our jobs the software and knowledge we require to do our trades we cannot purchase or own but lease from the companies who create them our knowledge and skills only available and affordable as long as we are rich enough to pay. Held with keys of our income as they slowly show the greed of the past not just to ask for our money month after month but to steal and sell our attention and time to whoever pays them a dime us nothing but eyes to auction to the highest bidder giving over our time. 

So we should not let such blindness persist, our information to be gone and stolen away behind locked doors and walls and to be lost because it was not deemed profitable or worthy to preserve and lost because too many people forgot. Yet there is a way to preserve the hope and dreams of the digital age, just as those of old built their hoards to preserve knowledge, so too must we now become the Digital Archivist. Download you books onto drives to build your own libraries, find the movies and shows that you love and download copies so they may not be forgotten, save the books and information you need build you archives and your libraries for as long as information is preserved it can be found and shared again don’t let the knowledge of our age become for forgotten just as the scribes of the past painstakingly transcribed the torch of the archivist has been past to you to keep knowledge alive.