“A savage place, as holy and enchanted, as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover.”--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn

If Coleridge never envisioned the Internet in one of his alcohol and opium binges, you can’t prove it by that quote. In words more suitable for a family publication (of which I make no claims for this book, homer), Norbert Wiener said:

The education of the average American child of the upper middle class is such as to guard him solicitously against the awareness of death and doom. He is brought up in an atmosphere of Santa Claus; and when he learns that Santa Claus is a myth, he cries bitterly. Indeed, he never fully accepts the removal of this deity from his Pantheon, and spends much of his later life in the search for some emotional substitute. ^(?)

Santa Claus is a god who gives us whatever we want, neatly packaged beneath a pagan symbol of fertility.

Santa Claus is almost as good a symbol for the Internet as a dead deer. The dead deer is the realistic symbol for the net. Santa Claus is what everyone wants the net to be. We want all the information in the world wrapped in an easily readable form. We want to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in three minutes. We want to meet members of the opposite and the same sex. We want sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And we want it all for free.

Santa Claus: Secret Agent Man

How can Santa give us everything, but only what we want? Santa will do it through agents. Agents are little Elf-like computer programs that individuals can use ^(!) to search out specific information on the net. You tell your Elf to go out and look for everything on the net that’s talking about Coleridge, for example, and off it goes, hopping from gopher to gopher, web to web, newsgroup to newsgroup, tagging everything that fits whatever criteria you gave it.

There are a lot of Internet sites out there. And a lot of information. As it stands today, these Elfs take an awfully long time and they waste a lot of computer time. They’re inefficient like nobody’s business. Let’s say there are twenty million people on the Internet. Tomorrow morning, every one of them sends out two Elfs to look for two different topics. There are now forty million Elfs running around the Internet peeking into every single Internet site. If Negative Space were to receive four hundred pops every second, it would die a horrible death--or, at best, service only two to three requests out of those four hundred every second. Obviously, a better solution is required.

Archie, Jughead, and Veronica are the current part of that solution. No, I’m really not making this up. The current Elfs are Pop Tate’s Malt Shoppe gang. There are a few hundred Archie sites, at best, and ten or so Veronica sites. As far as I can tell, there’s only one Jughead--but you already knew that from the comics. The Malt Shoppe gang do the work of those forty million Elfs, and all the forty million Elfs have to do is pop over to Archie, Jughead, or Veronica for what they want. “Is there anything there about the Constitution?” your agent asks. “Sure enough,” Veronica replies. “Take a look on Cerebus the Gopher in the Politics folder.” Don’t ask Veronica to look for Betty, however. I can’t guarantee the results you’ll get. Hell hath no fury like a woman digitized.

A Librarian’s Work is Never Done

Bringing books on-line is easy, if all you want is text. Words are discrete objects. When a book is scanned or typed into a computer, the words remain the same. Ten years down the line we might be able to scan them in faster, but the result isn’t going to change.

Films, pictures, and drawings, however, are analog--they have features down nearly to the molecular level. We can only scan these in as well as current technology lets us, and next year’s technology will make this year’s scanning obsolete. Like the woman sweeping the shore, we need to start all over again before we’ve even finished.

There was a similar problem when photographic technology changed as well, and our solution was simply to ignore it and create new films and photos. Likewise, we see today that digital video and still cameras are being used more and more because they make it easier to bring pictures directly to computer. These photos are as discrete as text. Of course, they will look hopelessly outdated to our children, as silent films or daguerrotypes do to us, but the information lost was lost when the photo was taken, not when the photo was scanned. So there is no ‘original’ to go back to, and no one cares. Some will even think them “quaint”.

This isn’t a solution so much as it is the way things are. New technology doesn’t replace old technology, it pushes the old stuff out of the way and into the attic.

Text is not immune to this. While the ‘raw text’ remains the same for an eternity, it looks pretty boring. I’m ‘prettying-up’ some books, that have passed into the public domain, for inclusion on FireBlade. That’s work that will become obsolete, possibly within a year. I’m trying to make these books look nice enough on the Internet so that people will read them on the Internet. So that they’ll come to FireBlade when they feel like doing a little light, or heavy, reading. There’s something on the Internet called HTML, HyperText Markup Language, that allows me to do very basic ‘typesetting’ of Internet documents. Here’s what Lewis Carroll’s introduction to The Hunting of the Snark looks like as ‘raw text’:

                           The Hunting of the Snark
                                  an Agony,
                                in Eight Fits

                                      by
                                Lewis Carroll

                         Inscribed to a dear Child:

                       in memory of golden summer hours
                        and whispers of a summer sea.

        Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
                Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
        Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
                        The tale he loves to tell.

Here’s what it looks like on FireBlade:

The Hunting of the Snark

an Agony,
in Eight Fits

by
Lewis Carroll

Inscribed to a dear Child:

in memory of golden summer hours
and whispers of a summer sea.

Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,

Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
The tale he loves to tell.

It’s not a major difference from the computer’s standpoint, but it makes a big difference for readers. The FireBlade version is something that could be read on it’s own. Something that the average person might stop by on their lunch break to happily browse through. That’s the plan, and I intend to add books that actually cost money as soon as I can work out how the customer pays, and find some authors who want to test their feet in the icy new waters of the infobahn.

But the next year will certainly bring improvements to how text can be displayed over the net, and whatever documents I bring on-line this year won’t take advantage of those improvements unless I waste time bringing them into the present. And time is not something I have an excess of; I’m not going to bother wasting time on old books because I’m going to choose to bring new books onto FireBlade rather than continually update the books I’ve already got.

Again, that’s the way new technologies work. When print itself first sprang from Gutenberg’s brow, printers didn’t realize what they had. They used their new technology to reprint medieval and classic texts. Once the printing machine penetrated society, authors began writing specifically for the printing press and the medieval texts were left behind.

Bane or Boon?

A bit over a hundred years ago, there was an incredible boom in print publishing. We’ve talked about it before: reading entered the realm of everyday life. This was not without its problems. The shift from book makers to book producers--small print runs for special classes of users to large print runs for the general public--resulted in, among other things, a ‘lower quality of paper’. The February 1895 issue of Scientific American complained:

Paper is now made of such inferior materials that it will soon rot, and very few of the books now published have much chance of a long life. The paper maker thus unwittingly assumes the function of the great literary censor of the age. However, his criticism is mainly destructive, and it is too severe. Without the power of selective appreciation, he condemns to destruction good and bad alike. ^(?)

The infobahn poses its own problems. We don’t know whether digital books will have shorter or longer lifespans than their paper counterparts. Recently, I read the on-line version of Peter Pan from the Gutenberg project. When I was finished reading, I deleted it from my computer. A book would have gone on my bookshelf, to a friend, or to a used bookstore. The electronic version is gone as if it never existed, replaced by my next reading chore, the electronic log of alt.sex.stories.

We are old. We are ever so much more than twentieth century.

Information technology is revolutionizing our concept of recordkeeping in an upheaval as great as the introduction of printing, if not of writing itself. The current generation of digital records has unique historical significance. Yet these documents are far more fragile than paper, placing the chronicle of our entire period in jeopardy. ^(?)

Over the short term, electronic books are much safer than paper books. The Gutenberg project, where Peter Pan is kept for public distribution, has (I hope) regular ‘backups’, duplicates of all of their books, kept in a safe place. If the main Gutenberg building, computer and all, burns down, they can call for their ‘backups’ and restore all of their data onto whatever new computer they get. If they can’t afford a new computer (they are volunteers, after all), they can supply their backups to someone else to restore on a different computer as a temporary measure. Hell, I’d even volunteer Cerebus for the task. Gutenberg is a very important project in the long run, and FireBlade--and any other bookstores on the infobahn--can only gain from the Gutenberg texts.

I take the same precaution on my personal computer. I have backups that I make every two or three nights, which I place in a safe here in our house. If my computer dies, I’ll lose, at most, three days’ work if the backups survive intact. Twice a year I also put a backup in my office at USD. So if even the safe fails, I don’t lose everything.

Over the long term, things are much less clear. My own personal backups are already becoming ‘unreadable’ as technology marches on: the latest version of the backup software I’m using at the University can’t read the backups created by its predecessors, which include the version I’m using here at home. Which means that if I ever have to ‘restore’ this book from the backups in my safe, I’ll need to find someone else who hasn’t upgraded to the newer version--because presumably, whatever catastrophe killed the copy of this book on my computer also killed the software on my computer. The old software that I’m using is only a year out of date, so that won’t be a problem. Should I try and restore from one of my twice-a-year ‘office’ backups a decade down the road, I will probably find it impossible. No one makes a point of keeping old computer software. It is neither collectible nor cute, nor cuddly in bed.

Even if I keep a copy of the backup software right there with the backups, it still isn’t going to do any good unless I also have the computer and operating system that the backup software was written on! Ten years ago I was using an almost completely different computer system. ^(!) Its software, even if I’d kept it, will not work on my current computer. My current software will almost certainly not work on whatever computer I own another ten years down the road. In short, computer documents are much more volatile in the long term than paper documents.

The same thing happens with those backups that Gutenberg keeps. And not only does backup software disappear, but the very medium that the backup is recorded onto becomes a white elephant. That computer system I had ten years ago used single-sided, single-density 5.25 inch computer disks. The computer I have now uses double-sided, high density 3.5 inch disks. Even if I still had my backup disks for that old battleship grey monstrosity, I couldn’t read them without also finding a 5.25 inch disk drive to put the disks in. And software to read single-sided, single density disks from a computer that has disappeared into history.

As an example of the government’s catlike reflexes when it comes to computer technology, the computer medium chosen as the government’s standard twenty years ago is still the government’s standard today--and is unreadable by the majority of computers owned by the government’s customers. There is a secondary industry sitting between the government and those who need government data, which converts that data from an unreadable format to something that modern computers can read.

The House of Representatives issued a panicky report in 1990 after noticing that many old government documents--available only on computer--had almost been lost completely, not due to the backups going bad but because no one noticed that the backup hardware necessary to read the backups was being thrown into the trash. ^(?)

The same process is happening, nearly unnoticed, to scientific, literary, and historical data created since the dawn of the personal computer and the dawn of the scientific computerized workstation. This data is sitting on someone’s hard drive, or sitting in a box in a closet in the back of the departmental offices. And every day that goes by, fewer and fewer computers can read that data. When no computer can read your computer disks, it doesn’t matter how many backups you have.