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The Article is untitled "Unable to Repeat the Past." The article states:

Digital storage methods, although vastly more capacious than the paper
they are rapidly replacing, have proved the softest wax. Heat and
humidity can destroy computer disks and tapes in as little as a year.
Computers can break down and software often becomes unusable in a
few years. A storage format can quickly become obsolete, making the
information it holds effectively inaccessible.

Consider this, everything we store on computer files...forgotten!!

Read the Article!!


Discussion Starters

  • Pose the following scenario to students: "You go home from
    school today and find out that computers no longer work. You
    come back to school the next day and find that computers still
    don't work and will never work again." Ask students to consider
    what they've lost? Ask what might be lost throughout the world.

  • Tell students that they should think about what things will be like
    1000 years into the future. Ask if they think that people in 1000
    years will understand the computer technology that we use today?
    (In order to help them think about this, ask them if they know
    how to tell time precisely using the sun. This is something that
    more people could do 1000 years ago than today.)

  • Ask students to define the term "memory." Ask them if there is
    such thing as a "national memory." What about a "global
    memory?" Ask them if they think that memory is important. Why?

  • According to the article, Jason Lanier, the computer scientist who
    made up the term "virtual reality," describes the potential for
    forgetting everything stored electronically this way, "If you let
    forgetting and remembering happen arbitrarily, you're losing part
    of yourself." Write this quotation on the board and ask students to
    do a quick write explaining what the sentence means. Then
    discuss it as a class. You migth choose to write this quotation on
    a class website and have students blog their understandings of it.

  • Ask your students to think about how to solve the problem. Tell
    them that they are on an advisory group to the National Archives
    and have been asked what to do to make sure that information of
    today is never lost. What can we do. (Tell them that one option is
    not putting everything that we have onto paper, because the
    government will refuse to allocate the space for holding this
    paper.) In groups have them develop proposals.
Forgetting the Present
September 13, 2006
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