New Electronic Media: Here today, gone tomorrow...forever.

There are books that are older than the United States. We're all going to die one day, and all of us hope that something we leave behind will somehow endure. It's been a reality for centuries that this has in fact been achieved through reasonably reliable forms of information storage for thousands of years. While most of what was written on on stone, on wet clay tablets and parchment throughout human history has been lost, we're still finding what we've forgotten collectively, as a species.

Forgetting and remembering is practically central to the human condition. We're always in a state of amnesia, wondering, attempting to penetrate the great mystery, ourselves.

Because we're mortal, we forget. This is what worries me a little about the new electronic media and how poorly it archives. With one entirely new system and code after another being introduced onto the consumer market, only data migration is going to preserve a lot of it. (On the other hand, we might find one bright spot in the NSA's fusion centers--they'll preserve everything currently on the Internet.)

Any movie shot on HD video will have to be transferred to another code eventually, and so on. It's inevitable that some data will be lost along the way. A low-tech nitrate print can last a century, if properly stored. At least a decade ago, there were articles about how a digitized version of the Domesday book (a log of taxable lands commissioned by William the Conqueror in the 11th century) couldn't be accessed by scholars in the UK because the language of the files was obsolete. Without the process of data migration done at a specific stage, you cannot access the information. A hard copy book doesn't crash. A 78 RPM record doesn't crash. A CD doesn't crash, albeit that it's prone to a similar obsolescence. Now we've learned how to encode DNA with information. That might actually be a good route for archiving, at least so long as you can preserve its substance, perhaps keeping it in a biologically immortal medium.

But, have we finally begun to admit with our embracing of the new media that all of this is ephemeral, and that we're not leaving a legacy worth rediscovering behind? Has it come down to this?

AP: "Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked"

WWW/NYC--My, my, my...where to begin? I'm trying to understand why in this day and age it's necessary for everyone to tell each other what's going to come their way inevitably, especially by word-of-mouth. All your new-fashioned applications and flashing-lights are frightening to this American primitive, and lately, I've been seeing colored-dots without the usual chemical refreshments, causing anxieties over whether I'm epileptic or not.

In addition, we now seem to have three--count them, three--new verbs added to the English-lexicon, and nobody, I mean nobody, consulted Oxford University. The gall (Google it).

But it gets worse: Michael Jackson actually died many years ago and his brain was cryogenically-frozen and stored at a Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems complex so that future generations could listen to banal droning coming from a cybernetic being other than a Philip K. Dick Cheney or a Walt Disney. Hey, they needed something to blot-out the news coming out of the Middle East, and women with large, fake breasts weren't cutting it anymore...

Where were you when Kennedy died? Fuck that man--pfft!--Jacko died, and through the magic of technology we never asked for or needed, we could find out that it was so just moments after the LAPD's announcement--faster than microwaving a pizza, and just about as satisfying.

But wait, it's not all bells-and-whistles, and quit annoying me, asshole:

"Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment," said media critic Jeff Jarvis. So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: "You might care more what your friends say than some analyst."

Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda.

"That was re-tweeted a lot," Jarvis said.

("Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked," AP, 06.27.2009)

Thanks Mr. Jarvis! Wow! Empathy is great, don't get me wrong, but we're making a generation of twittering "Otakus" ( おたく/オタク) which is Japanese for dorks who are a storehouse of worthless data and information (people who never, ever, get laid, like me).

Are there any Otakus out there who are political junkies? That seems impossible considering the qualifiers. Now spit.