July 16, 2009A Digital Lindisfarne
There are two basic interpretations of the changes our culture is going through in the early Internet age. One is that we're sinking into "a digital dark ages," drowning in a sea of random data from which we derive no actual knowledge or wisdom. Twittering, tweeting, texting, blogging, vlogging and gaming ourselves into the abyss, our heads filled with useless trivia, our attention spans reduced to roughly that of protozoa.
The other is all about the democratization of information, the decentralization of the power-centers of knowledge, the People liberating themselves from the old info-tyrannies, taking over their news and entertainments, creating their own communities.
You can find plenty of examples to back either argument. The average citizen today has more information, literally at his fingertips, than the brainiest, best-educated scholars of old could have dreamed of "accessing." Old media, with their stranglehold on what we get to know when and how ("All the News That's Fit to Print" — says who?), are toppling.
Yet we do seem to know less. The whole vast storehouse of human knowledge and experience is quickly going online, as huge libraries of books, film, music and photography go digital. But we seem too distracted by a ravenous hunger for up-to-the-nanosecond news and trivia to make any use of all that information. We never heard of Abelard and Heloise, but we know way more than is right or seemly about Jon and Kate. Then again, the historic interest in the former was not all that different from our current obsession with the latter. Doomed romance — we can't get enough of it.
Who knows which argument will prove correct? Probably both of them, simultaneously. The Internet will become the universal library of all libraries, making all human knowledge available to everybody all the time, but many of us will be too busy twittering and tweeting about brunch to notice or use it.
In the meantime, we love sites like The Internet Archive. We think of it as a kind of digital Lindisfarne, a beacon of light in the digital dark ages. It's a portal to a huge collection of films, television and radio broadcasts, texts and music, from the historical to the current, all available online. Like any good library it's intelligently organized and indexed for either serious research or just browsing. It was founded and is located in San Francisco, and there's a whiff of neo-hippie alterna-culture to it — a large selection of Grateful Dead music, for example, and a current events section seeded with PBS programming and shows like "Democracy Now!" and "Free Speech TV." But that's a small quibble. Who else but neo-hippy lefties would staff a digital Lindisfarne?
We love the Moving Images section. There's animation from 1930s cartoons to 3D computer imagery, and drive-in movie ads, and WWII newsreels, and much more. There's the massive Prelinger Archives of more than 2,000 industrial, educational and public information films. Some of our recent faves among these include Rube Goldberg starring in a 1940 featurette on the virtues of the internal combustion engine, sponsored by Chevrolet; a bunch of home movies shot at the 1939 World's Fair (the best and most amazing of all the World's Fairs, we think); and a large selection of those educational films of the 50s teaching teens etiquette and manners.
A section called Fedflix is a big cache of government films, from the famous "Duck and Cover" (how to survive an atom bomb) of 1951 to spooky contemporary training and info films with titles like "Rural Surveillance" and "Riot Control Agents — Medical Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties."
The Texts wing of the library connects the user to online archives of more than a million scanned books, articles and other documents, including the great and pioneering Project Gutenberg and many university and public library digital collections. On a quick browse we just found Newton's Principia, a Tamil-English dictionary, Swift's poems, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, a 19th-century political tract called Rescue Cuba Now, a collection of French fairytales and a whole library of Yiddish literature.
There's also a big section of audio files we haven't much explored, with everything from audio books to vintage radio programs to readings of poetry and the Quran. And the Grateful Dead.
That the Internet poses both the threat of and solutions to our digital devolution isn't particularly paradoxical, or even newfangled. A hundred years ago your could walk into your local public library and choose between Newton and a Bulwer-Litton novel. We can still do that online. That choice, at least, has always been ours to make.
We love the Moving Images section. There's animation from 1930s cartoons to 3D computer imagery, and drive-in movie ads, and WWII newsreels, and much more. There's the massive Prelinger Archives of more than 2,000 industrial, educational and public information films. Some of our recent faves among these include Rube Goldberg starring in a 1940 featurette on the virtues of the internal combustion engine, sponsored by Chevrolet; a bunch of home movies shot at the 1939 World's Fair (the best and most amazing of all the World's Fairs, we think); and a large selection of those educational films of the 50s teaching teens etiquette and manners.
A section called Fedflix is a big cache of government films, from the famous "Duck and Cover" (how to survive an atom bomb) of 1951 to spooky contemporary training and info films with titles like "Rural Surveillance" and "Riot Control Agents — Medical Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties."
The Texts wing of the library connects the user to online archives of more than a million scanned books, articles and other documents, including the great and pioneering Project Gutenberg and many university and public library digital collections. On a quick browse we just found Newton's Principia, a Tamil-English dictionary, Swift's poems, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, a 19th-century political tract called Rescue Cuba Now, a collection of French fairytales and a whole library of Yiddish literature.
There's also a big section of audio files we haven't much explored, with everything from audio books to vintage radio programs to readings of poetry and the Quran. And the Grateful Dead.
That the Internet poses both the threat of and solutions to our digital devolution isn't particularly paradoxical, or even newfangled. A hundred years ago your could walk into your local public library and choose between Newton and a Bulwer-Litton novel. We can still do that online. That choice, at least, has always been ours to make.
