| >Why has digital life removed substance? I have no idea about the how, but it's not hard to understand that bits are fragile and totally dependent on a huge network of many technologies. I spent last week in Europe looking at ancient buildings and incredible art. Some of this stuff is literally millennia old - but people are still queuing around the block to see it. If you build something out of atoms, that sucker stays there - not quite forever, but some combinations of atoms can easily outlast many human lifetimes. Compare that with bits, where file formats, storage media, operating systems, and basic hardware all keep changing and content preservation is hit and miss. (I have video files from the late 1990s that are unplayable now.) Code is even more fragile, especially if it's heavily OS- or framework-specific. So people like physical stuff. It can survive without power or a reader device. That makes it more reassuring than a transient digital content blip that's gone before your kids have had a chance to experience it. |