4 ms·

The cool thing about this for me is that list of the 'worst of 1924'. It highlights that we're trying to preserve ALL media. Not the best of the best, not some

The cool thing about this for me is that list of the 'worst of 1924'. It highlights that we're trying to preserve ALL media. Not the best of the best, not some cherry-picked list made up by a bunch of critics. Every single flat comedy, ever unoriginal love song, every boring book, it's all being preserved, if found. Because even bad art matters and, besides, it's not bad to everyone. It's important to keep this attitude for the upcoming years of works, where there'll be much more stuff to save. Let's not just take care of Hitchcock's and Chaplin's and so on. Ed Woods of the world deserve remembrance as well.

lonelappde 7y ago
There is a difference between bad (which may be interesting) and boring. As good as production tools and archival media get, human attention is finite. It does no good to drown in dross. Remembering everything is a curse, and leads to madness in the humans who have a memory disability and cannot forget even their own personal last.
- est31 7y ago
  I agree with you that at the individual level, forgetting things is important for sanity and wellbeing. When it comes to the culture of a country though, I don't think we should only preserve what we currently consider interesting. The purpose of an archive is to preserve things which may become interesting in the future. Consider a society of philosophers, poets and artists who create amazing pieces of art. Then, consider a change in that society where the populace is more interested in horse races instead. Now all their writings become about horse races, the biographies of those horse racers, etc. They dismiss the old stuff as uninteresting. Should they destroy the books written by those philosophers and instead recycle the paper for printing stories about racing horses onto it? For us in the future, such a destruction would be quite sad. It would be silly to assume that we don't have present biases either. Maybe back then, everyone was familiar with the poets so there was no need to preserve their art as everyone already knew it. And why teach it to children when they are more interested in horse races? Many archaeologic sites have been visited by pillagers again and again over the centuries (continues until today [1]). What are they taking? The interesting stuff they can sell. Too often, only the "boring" stuff remains to contemporary archaeologists. How happy they are when they find a receipt written into a clay tablet! For decades, no piece of Bach was performed publicly. Now he's considered as one of the greatest musicians of all times. People could have tossed away his manuscripts as uninteresting yet they didn't. Another example is how many scenes of the Metropolis movie were cut during distribution and the original version only survived thanks to an Argentinian museum. It gets even worse when political or religious arguments come into play. Greek art was considered heathen lore and only survived thanks to muslims preserving it. Mayan books were burned by missionaries. IS has been bombing many ancient sites it had control over. All these folks consider the stuff they destroy to be harmful and uninteresting. After all, a good muslim is only interested in qran, a good christian only in the bible. Fortunately we at least preserve the writings of the past centuries that we consider politically incorrect today instead of destroying them, but there are stories of british archives even in the present day "misplacing" evidence of crimes committed during colonization. [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/egypts-3-billion-dollar-smuggling-problem/10388394 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/egypts-3-billion-doll...
btown 7y ago
The brilliantly optimistic thing about an exponentially growing, resource-unconstrained interstellar civilization (which we will hopefully survive to become) is that as long as the ability and desire to consume media grows proportionally to the ability and desire to create media... the amount of media from the past will be less than newly created material at any given time (∫e^t = O(e^t)), and thus media from 2019 should be as accessible in 3019 as media from 1920 is, if not more so. We are creating an infinite legacy, and that's really really cool.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Or it’s a gold rush and media is a finite space.

lonelappde 7y ago

There is a difference between bad (which may be interesting) and boring. As good as production tools and archival media get, human attention is finite. It does no good to drown in dross. Remembering everything is a curse, and leads to madness in the humans who have a memory disability and cannot forget even their own personal last.

est31 7y ago
I agree with you that at the individual level, forgetting things is important for sanity and wellbeing. When it comes to the culture of a country though, I don't think we should only preserve what we currently consider interesting. The purpose of an archive is to preserve things which may become interesting in the future. Consider a society of philosophers, poets and artists who create amazing pieces of art. Then, consider a change in that society where the populace is more interested in horse races instead. Now all their writings become about horse races, the biographies of those horse racers, etc. They dismiss the old stuff as uninteresting. Should they destroy the books written by those philosophers and instead recycle the paper for printing stories about racing horses onto it? For us in the future, such a destruction would be quite sad. It would be silly to assume that we don't have present biases either. Maybe back then, everyone was familiar with the poets so there was no need to preserve their art as everyone already knew it. And why teach it to children when they are more interested in horse races? Many archaeologic sites have been visited by pillagers again and again over the centuries (continues until today [1]). What are they taking? The interesting stuff they can sell. Too often, only the "boring" stuff remains to contemporary archaeologists. How happy they are when they find a receipt written into a clay tablet! For decades, no piece of Bach was performed publicly. Now he's considered as one of the greatest musicians of all times. People could have tossed away his manuscripts as uninteresting yet they didn't. Another example is how many scenes of the Metropolis movie were cut during distribution and the original version only survived thanks to an Argentinian museum. It gets even worse when political or religious arguments come into play. Greek art was considered heathen lore and only survived thanks to muslims preserving it. Mayan books were burned by missionaries. IS has been bombing many ancient sites it had control over. All these folks consider the stuff they destroy to be harmful and uninteresting. After all, a good muslim is only interested in qran, a good christian only in the bible. Fortunately we at least preserve the writings of the past centuries that we consider politically incorrect today instead of destroying them, but there are stories of british archives even in the present day "misplacing" evidence of crimes committed during colonization. [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/egypts-3-billion-dollar-smuggling-problem/10388394 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/egypts-3-billion-doll...

btown 7y ago

The brilliantly optimistic thing about an exponentially growing, resource-unconstrained interstellar civilization (which we will hopefully survive to become) is that as long as the ability and desire to consume media grows proportionally to the ability and desire to create media... the amount of media from the past will be less than newly created material at any given time (∫e^t = O(e^t)), and thus media from 2019 should be as accessible in 3019 as media from 1920 is, if not more so. We are creating an infinite legacy, and that's really really cool.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
Or it’s a gold rush and media is a finite space.