[glofish]

Is it really a big deal that some really old movies are lost ... sorry but I just don't see why ...

I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.

Forgetting is also a gift - it is is foolish to think that you have to preserve everything.

I think it is a much bigger problem that too much of today's photos and videos are preserved.

Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.

The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.

[sonofhans]

“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” I find that more compelling than, “Erase the past so we can build again.”

The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. If we remember the past we can build on it — standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say — rather than re-finding old mistakes.

Old movies teach us about (of course) old movies, and that’s interesting for anyone learning the art. Even in very dated art there is often something worth copying, stealing, learning from.

Old movies teach us about ourselves, and in a more visceral way than any other art form. Some of those old movies show cultural context in a way that’s difficult to document — clothes, street signs, mannerisms, slang.

There are already plenty of forces intent upon the destruction of old cultural artifacts, from Egyptian pharaohs breaking monuments of prior rulers, to the burning of the library at Alexandria, to the looting of the Baghdad museums in the Gulf War. That doesn’t even account for the primary killers of old culture: mildew, insects, rot, loss, indifference, repurposing.

It’s a miracle when any old culture survives. It’s a good thing.

[WalterBright]

Yeah, but we still don't learn from mistakes with well-known history behind them.

For example, I still hear from smart, educated people that we can stop illegal drug use by applying severe punishment to the drug suppliers.

[usefulcat]

It might be that knowledge of the past is necessary but not sufficient to avoid repeating previous mistakes.

The fact that some people lack knowledge (whether by choice or by accident) is hardly a compelling argument against its utility.

[randmeerkat]

> The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation.

At first glance this makes sense, but then if that was really the case, why are we losing cultural artifacts and not protecting them..? Why is copyright law continuing to be weaponized to such an extent..? Maybe what culture “was” has changed and modern culture is just one of ownership and consumerism.

[monsieurgaufre]

While i somewhat agree with you, i do not share your optimism. We already have lots of information to prevent from repeating errors from the past. Yet, more than i'd like seem to creep out of the shadows right now.

And I'm not even talking about the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of a cultural item.

[glofish]

Remembering the past does not mean remember every single pointless thing.

Lots of things in the past were not worth the paper they were printed on.

[sonofhans]

That is a common attitude. Consider also that “worth” is relative. I’d burn the Mona Lisa for heat to keep my family alive, but that doesn’t mean it has no worth.

The writer & engraver William Blake, one of the most influential artists of the last few centuries, was so poor that he had to melt down his copper printing plates once he’d used them. He couldn’t afford to buy more copper. Blake’s technique was unique in all of printing, and a little insane, and fantastically detailed. Having all his original plates would be glorious.

So was it that those plates were worth nothing? Not at all. He had to feed his family.

And note that no one — no one at all — is arguing to “remember every single pointless thing.” That’s a straw man. You’ll have better discussions if you avoid such things.

[glofish]

Imagine that Mona Lisa was lost shortly after its creation ... do you think we would not have something else like Mona Lisa in its place?

Society created the value of Mona Lisa out of nothing. It is not such a unique thing - there are tens of thousands of paintings that could be just as valuable.

[johnwalkr]

OK and saving a bunch of film reels or tens of thousands of Mona Lisas takes a tiny amount of space in a salt mine warehouse or some megabytes or gigabytes taking literally zero space. It's not a zero-sum game where disposing of this stuff makes more room for future artists.

[jpollock]

Lots of things have been lost because people didn't consider them worth paper.

What is important ends up being very strange. Ephemera become _very_ important.

For example, how did women care for their hair during Victorian times? Did they wash their hair? What with? Lye soap is really strong, and they didn't have detergent based shampoos.

So, what did they use?

That example came to mind because it was the focus of one of the "live a while in the shoes of someone from time X" on TV. It was a huge thing for the women of the house to be able to care for their hair, and no one knew how it was done!

What we consider useless to keep now may become extremely important to a future historian.

[danaris]

Talk to an archaeologist sometime.

Some of the most valuable finds in terms of learning about past societies have been very ordinary things: the everyday objects that we make, use, and keep says so much about us that doesn't get put into official records.

Archival isn't just for entertainment. It's for research, for history, and for remembering and understanding where we've come from.

[ShroudedNight]

There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch."

Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.

[glofish]

how about the current era, where every human generates thousands of photos per year ... is that a history worth remembering and will it help where we've come from?

I am not saying to not study history, I am saying storing everything is probably worse than storing half of it.

[danaris]

Aside from the pictures of the insides of purses or completely blurry and incomprehensible ones, yeah, it's worth remembering, and it will help understand where we've come from if we can preserve it for the next few centuries. Especially since so much of it is time- and geo-tagged. That kind of dataset is an absolute gold mine for people studying history.

Seriously, talk to some people whose field this is, or at least look up some things by or about them.

[pizzaknife]

"Yellow Journalism" - a contemporary appreciation might have gone a long way

[troutwine]

> I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.

While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving?

> The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.

Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.

[at_a_remove]

Stoker's widow won a lawsuit and all of the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed. Well, all but one. Every copy today has that source, that accidental source, as its ancestor.

"Bothering to preserve" is a terribly blunt filter. Luck (good: a crazed archivist; bad: a nitrate fire) is too fickle to select for the best.

It isn't just the films themselves: often, we have no sense of a given actor's career. We know that they had a huge impact at the time, but we have only secondhand evidence of it.

[blakesterz]

Turns out to be a pretty interesting story, and one that I somehow never heard!

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosfer...

[jutrewag]

The mistake was letting a widow have a say in anything.

[pjc50]

Couple of these "who cares about old stuff" comments on here and I worry that this is the dark side of the AI revolution; once you're hooked up to the infinite content hose, or Bach faucet, you're adrift from culture as a continuous succession of works by humans engaged in conversation with one another.

[libraryatnight]

I don't know that I'd argue - in the case of cultural artifacts - that time is a quality filter. I'm certainly glad that it seems as much good stuff survives as we have, but we also find lots of interesting things after the fact and in spite of ourselves. We make a decent attempt at archiving things of cultural significance so far as we can assess such things in our own time is about as generous as I'd get.

Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.

[JasonFruit]

In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.

[hedora]

I think that was more true when less stuff was being produced, and the cost of keeping a copy was non-zero.

Those things stopped being true ~ 100 years ago, so now we end up with strange filters. For example, a large number of high-value film masters were lost in a single warehouse fire. (Arguably, shorter copyright terms would have prevented that, since distributors and fans would have had geographically distributed backups that the film studio had little financial incentive to maintain).

[JasonFruit]

Those are all good points.

[WalterBright]

As a musician, perhaps you can answer this for me.

It seems that people who play a guitar try their hand at composing music. But the people who play violins and other orchestral instruments appear to be satisfied playing other peoples' compositions.

Why is that? Have you tried to compose new viola pieces?

[JasonFruit]

I do compose and make arrangements — and am firmly a mediocrity. In fact, lots of the great composers were violists: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Britten, Dvorak, and others. Most of them also played a keyboard instrument, which is a useful tool for a composer, but a violist is perfectly placed to understand the orchestra as a whole, and is usually not saddled with too difficult a part, so they can spare some attention.

Also, violinists who composed were very common, but their works tend to display skill rather than profundity. Paganini is a good example: delightful melody, amazing technical displays, but not a lot to sink your teeth into.

[tzs]

I don't play viola or any other orchestra instrument, but do play some guitar, so much of this is just a guess.

I'd guess that a big factor is that guitar is a good solo instrument. It can do melody and chords well. You can get a good full sounding piece of music out of a guitar. Also if you want you can sing while you play so it works great if you want to add words to your composition.

Most orchestra instruments don't really work nearly as well solo. Yes, many classical pieces include solos for various instruments but those solos are meant to be in the context of the orchestra or string quartet or whatever. If all you've got is a lone violinist while that can be beautify it is not going to have the richness that you can get from a lone guitar (or a lone piano). Also for many orchestra instruments singing while playing them might be hard or annoying.

So if I want to try composing for my guitar, I only have to get good enough at composing to compose decent guitar music.

A violist would probably need to get good enough to compose for viola and for at least the rest of a string quartet.

[WalterBright]

While it's true you cannot sing while playing the trumpet, Herp Alpert could make his trumpet sing!

But still, he played covers of other peoples' songs.

[theresistor]

Lots of violin players do composition (and even improvisation!) they just call it a fiddle when they do so!

Less cheekily, the difference you're pointing out is about folk vs classical traditions. Many instruments are strongly associated with one or the other, but the violin is one of few that exists in both.

[yamtaddle]

I think it's a genre thing. I bet you can find plenty of violinists, at least, composing music, in the bluegrass scene, for example.

Instruments that rarely feature as regular parts of more folk-derived genres, sure, probably not so much. Viola, French Horn, that kind of thing.

[glofish]

> Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.

What would you think of a service, that when you take a photograph that is beautiful, unique and moving for you and say you want to share it with someone else - would pop in and would should an image just like it - only a better with some additional elements that make it even more breathtaking - taken by someone else and would recommend you to send that

wouldn't you prefer to have your own emotions?

[duped]

> Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.

It also takes away future generations' knowledge that such a phenomenal photo can be taken and potentially the means to do so.