Today I bring to you an article from Forbes’ contributor Kalev Leetaru regarding the interaction of technology with society, namely the repercussion that the digitalization era has on human society and its implications on the potential loss of past knowledge.
According to the author, the preservation of our history can be divided into two segments: one which encompasses all web archives where our online world is stored and another where museums and traditional archives struggle to preserve our past. Society has in recent decades grown accustomed to have easy and free access to the world’s literature through digital screens, which means that everything that has not yet been digitized might incur the risk of being forever lost to the digital era. This is particularly worrisome when it comes to underrepresented topics, geographies and languages that expand beyond traditional English language content. However, the author points out that the rise of powerful smartphone cameras has promising potential to facilitate vast crowd sourced digitization of this type of materials thus enabling mass scale access preservation of a large fraction of the world’s books.
Furthermore, copyright issues established since the late 1920’s have been a challenge to the effective digitization of printed knowledge and to its fair use, which still leads to a great effort in order to specifically find this information, thus making scholars and individuals leave the comfort of the digital world and dive into the old-fashioned physical realm.
In my opinion, the digitalization of knowledge should be a priority not only for institutions but also to individuals. With that said, I believe time shouldn’t bound knowledge. If we look back to the beginning of times, we cannot quantify the amount of relevant information that has been forever lost to the ages. For that reason, if today we have the technology to preserve almost all wisdom and know-how that mankind was able to gather – is probably impossible to save every bit of information -, I think that all efforts towards its preservation should be done. Even in the corporate business world, for example, the preservation of knowledge is essential so that past mistakes won’t repeat themselves. As George Santayana so remarkably said, “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness… when experience is not retained … infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
So, what is your opinion? As asked in the article, “as we race towards our digital future will we lose touch with and ultimately forget our history”? What do you think will be the implications for the business world?
Forbes.com. (2017). Forbes Welcome. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/09/29/in-a-digital-world-are-we-losing-sight-of-our-undigitized-past/#5fb7f9e0cd01 [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017]
