SAFEKEEPING

The first part of this post is in the nature of a Guest Post by my husband, aka "anyjazz", after which I've added a few lines myself.

By "anyjazz"
Prompted by the post:
The Good and Not So Old Days,
from Thursday, May 28, 2015 -

At the risk of sounding like a rabid conspiracy theorist, here are some thoughts on the digital era.

Unless one of our current minimum-wage PhDs invents a completely tamper-proof, loss proof digital system, humanity is doomed to lose a substantial segment of subtleties in its history. The big facts will remain in memory but the detail found in photographic documentation will be gone. Forever.

A few years ago my daughter boasted videos and photographs of a great grandson’s beginnings. She documented his first steps, words and other childhood events. All on her phone. The data could not be transferred to anything, another phone, a computer, a “cloud” or a disk. The history is lost.

How do we examine some history of say, the 1920’s? We read about it and look at the plethora of pictures and cinema from that era, printed and reprinted in books. We can look at that old, black-page photograph album from the closet shelf that great grandma put together with US in mind! That decade was nearly a hundred years ago. What will be left of the current era a hundred years from now?

Will there be “clouds” of photographs and text available conveniently for perusal and education? Or are we doomed to become more and more uninformed about the reality we live in?

Twilight is right. One big bang and it’s all gone. Or perhaps “not available” to an inquiring mind. History might be reduced to oral stories from memory, passed down in limited quantities to new memories; New memories that do not have the depth and color of their predecessors, nor their passion.

What was the government’s big problem with the Vietnam disaster? It was on television, step by step, mistake by mistake. People saw it. People didn’t want any more of it. The lucrative war machine ground to a halt for a while. That’s not going to happen again. No more satellite transmissions of digital television from on the scene.

If George Orwell had known of this digital development, he would have said “Aha! See! I told you so.” Keep the public uninformed of current events. Keep historical events dim so that they can be re-written at any time. You can’t say things are better or worse today than they were yesterday, because you don’t accurately remember yesterday. The corporate governments won’t want you making those comparisons anyway.

And after all, deleting data files is much safer and tidier than burning books.

Even without dire calamity removing the internet from our lives, there are still problems associated with our digital way of life. An interesting article explains:

Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk...Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf.

Snip:

The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitised in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

It's good to have precious photographs and documents available in both paper and digital form - "proper" photos and papers can be lost for ever too - as I know very well due to having lost all of my own to fire in 1996. Fortunately my mother's collection provided some replacements, but the majority remain lost forever.

 At Shutterfly

One method of saving photographs the "paper-way", while still taking advantage of our digital world, is to make up a "photo book" with the help of one of the several companies offering this service: Walgreens, Shutterfly etc. Here's a comparison and review of the ten currently offering this service. We haven't yet used this service, but intend to do so.

The Good & Not So Old Days

Looking back in time, not too far - a few decades only - have we lost something important without fully realising it? Two articles below offer food for thought:

Ten polite things people just don't seem to do anymore
(E.g. 2 of them: writing thank you notes; giving your undivided attention to your company, rather than your phone.)

Does the digital era herald the end of history?

"But anyone who's seen their photo or music collections wiped out, knows how easily digital files can be lost".

"And in an increasingly networked digital world, the same catastrophic result could be achieved by a particularly virulent piece of malware or through state-sponsored cyber-warfare. The loss of this data could plunge the world into a "digital dark age", warns "father of the internet" Vint Cerf - one of the inventors of the net's language and architecture."

Air Age to Digital Age

In my old volume, The Best of the Illustrated National Astrological Journal 1933-4, picked up in an antique store some years ago, there's a rather odd article by Augusta Foss Heindel, wife of Max Heindel occultist, astrologer and mystic. The piece is titled: "Air Age Tests Human Heart....Noted Astro-diagnostician sees changes in heart due to Aquarian Age influence"

1933 - Aquarian Age? I think not. By some astrologers' calculations we are still, even in 2014, nowhere near the Age of Aquarius, even though that label does fit the current Age - as we see it, not as proper calculation would define it. Maybe people have been willing on the Age of Aquarius since an astrologer first came up with the concept.

Still, laying aside argument about astrological Ages, here are a few excerpts from what the author proposed:
She began:

We are entering an "air" age! On every side we see evidence of this fact. Several years ago an advertising man of Colorado coined the term "air-minded"; daring men conquered oceans with airplanes; millions of dollars flooded into the industry of aeronautics; air mail, air passengers and even air freight were discussed by everyone................It is evident that the public has definitely "accepted" aviation and is building toward an "air" future.

The author goes on to explain why this should be....

We know that the earth itself advances in direct relation to the precession of the equinoxes. And we are now entering into the airy, electrical and etheric sign Aquarius, During this age men must conquer the air and ethers which surround the earth.

That brings me to a point bearing upon man himself. To conquer the air, man's physical body must undergo some changes. Just as Lemurian and early Atlantean men had to develop lungs in order to breathe the clearer atmosphere, so must man now develop organs which will enable him to fulfill the divine plan.

There are two organs undergoing this evolutionary change, the eyes and the heart. The eyes must adjust themselves to become responsive to a higher octave of vision, and the heart must develop "cross stripes" or muscles which will be more easily controlled by mental process. It is interesting to note that eye and heart tests are the outstanding tests in the physical examinations of airplane pilots..................Eye and heart trouble are prevalent now because of these changes which are taking place.........greater number of people, especially young people (are) wearing glasses........The development which is taking place in these two organs has become more perceptible since the planet Neptune transited the heart sign Leo, which occurs only once every 168 years, September 1914 marked the beginning of this transit and since that time heart ailments have increased tremendously.......................

She continues about astrological diagnosis in health care generally.

While I took most of what the author had written with a hefty pinch of salt, I did begin trying to relate her ideas to today's world. Do we need some modification physically to cope with our digital age/ technologial age/virtual age/social-networking age?

Leo rules the heart, according to astrological lore; Mrs Heindel's words were written during a Neptune transit of Leo. Neptune currently, in 2014, transits Pisces, sign of its own rulership. I see no connection to the digital age. A better connection would be Neptune's Aquarius transit, 1998 - 2012. We'd entered the computer age in general some decades earlier than that, but personal computer use and the internet took off on a far wider scale during that time span. Anatomically Aquarius relates to the shins and ankles, and, via its traditional ruler Saturn, to the bones, teeth, joints and skeletal structure.

I cannot see the same kind of connection Mrs Heindel made between the heart, Leo and the "air age". Current human physicality in need of development to better match our digital age would be in the brain's realm, which is ruled by Mercury, whose home signs are Gemini and Virgo. Currently no planet transits, but Saturn, traditional ruler of Aquarius, has transited both signs since 2000: 2001-3 for Gemini and 2007-9 for Virgo.

Are we humans in for some evolutionary modification, mentally, to cope with this digital age? Did humans really need heart and eye strengthening in order to deal with the "air age", which of course went on to develop into "the space age"? Flyers managed well enough with basic aircraft, but once speed barriers were broken, and space travel became a possibility, from there on, I guess only the strongest were chosen to take part. So...perhaps following a similar pattern, to date in the digital age's early stages, we've coped well enough with new technology, but coming decades could prove that we shall not be able to cope with anything more complex without a touch of evolutionary physical modification.