Something extremely obvious struck me this morning. Any information in digital form (such as this blog) will only exist as long as someone maintains it. By "maintain", I don't mean someone has to keep posting updates, rather that the host for the service must keep it running, the company must stay in business, the formats being used in the files must be upgraded as the become obsolete, backups need to be performed and computers kept running. That means all of our digital data will likely evaporate in a few years. I have files on my computer at work that were created by an IBM program called write. They are binary files and I have no software that can read them. There may be a translator out there somewhere, but I haven't bothered to look for it because I'm not maintaining them. The significant things is that they must be actively maintained to continue to exist.
If I had printed my my IBM Write files out into a book form in the 1980's when they were created, it would be still on my shelf and still accessible. It would require no maintenance or involvement other than keeping them from getting water damaged or throwing them away in a cleaning fit. So much of the information in my life and all of our lives is maintained in a fragile, high maintenance format that requires constant (on an historic time scale) intervention to keep it from vanishing. All of my family photos are now digital. I have a few prints of a few good ones but they are electronic. I back them up on multiple computers and even to an internet back-up service. Yet all the places where the sit require the regular, ongoing, active support of a large number of people. We are like the proverbial plate spinners. The moment anyone walks away, all our information collapses into a worthless pile.
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I've often thought about this. As technology continues to advance, we have to keep copying old information from old media to new media. So old home movies that were originally recorded on film and were transferred to VHS now have to be digitized to DVD even as those are being slowly replaced by Blurays, for example.
But as my last grandparent went home just last year I see how the direct memories of past generations die with those who contain those memories. Whenever I visit with the elderly, I cherish any accounts they give me of former days.
So it is that we have scholars who specialize in history for recent times and archaeology for ancient times. Yet we have recorded perfectly for us the history we need to know in God's perfect revelation to us. And in these days where technology allows the creation of all kinds of new information, none of it is as valuable as the accessibility to us of the oldest information known to man recorded in the text of the Bible.
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