CDs and DVDs Not So Immortal After All

Jeanie Straub says:

This is a surprise?
I don’t mean to sound snotty, but this story was treated like banner news on one of the high-end lists when it was first moving on the wires; it was a buried feature — um, filler — in the business section the following day. And, um, folks were surprised by this story? Why? What do folks want, never to die? This is not breaking news. Geez. It is called entropy, and you can’t outrun it for long. I LOVED my preservation class — taught by the esteemed Randy Silverman — and love running into Luddites, but I hate it when people get overly self-righteous about technology issues and the downside to technology. Because, news flash again, paper has its own issues (i.e. it burns — witness Bosnia, Iraq, etc.), CDs can be made into multiple copies, they can be stored properly, on and on, and they can fail, as a paperback fails, fail big, and we as a culture will lose a bunch of good stuff next time we migrate to the next big innovation — why aren’t folks complaining about the fine art films you can’t find, period, at the retail monopolists? The guy interviewed by the AP writer should write a big fat letter of complaint to the music industry for shoddy manufacturing, etc., but because one of my music CDs fails doesn’t mean everyone needs to get on the milk crate and say, “See, told you so: Technology isn’t so perfect.” (If one of mine fails, it is because I sat on it in the car, where it baked for 72 hours.) Technology is our baby, the enemy is us. And, to quote a great film on digital preservation, We can’t go home. The problem to me is that folks are quick to criticize technology but slow to line up to be part of the solution. It is like someone saying that the banks are going to fail tomorrow. Maybe so, but at 35 I have to continue to operate in the world with the information and tools I have. Everybody wants a magic bullet, but none of them wants to pay for it. They just want to live forever or have some evidence that they existed last forever, and they want it all to be free or available for cheaper than free in bulk at Sam’s Club. I’m not saying CDs are fabulous and that this isn’t a real, relevant issue and a good story all around for everybody on the planet to read. It is that I get tired of the overall theme and the high-and-mighty reaction from folks. As the daughter of an electrical engineer and the sister of an embedded software engineer, I can tell you that stuff breaks down. When I first got my laptop for my MLS program, I was afraid to take it out of the box. My brother’s advice was to plug it in and run it for 72 hours. Engineers are failure-based. Instead of counting your chickens before they are hatched, you count broken eggs before they are dropped. I’ve had to suffer through the tour of a clean room with a tape drive running none-stop; the point of that is failure. Not will it fail, but when will it fail. And I don’t remember anyone saying CDs were designed to last 100 years. I do remember warped LPs and LPs that were stored properly. No one started buying CDs because they were supposed to last 100 years. We started buying CDs because all the other consumers voted that LPs could go away. There were a lot of reasons why we started buying CDs, and I don’t remember long-term viability being one of them. Just because the music industry produces shoddy CDs doesn’t mean we need to kill the baby … the articles notes accountability in manufacturing; that’s a good start. Let’s also go to the automobile manufacturers and ask for cars that will last 100 years and run on solar, while we’re at it.