This made me think of 1984 and how the protagonist's job is to manufacture public record to support the totalitarian regime. He can barely fathom reality because he's part of the machine that destroys and recreates it. In the end, once he's broken by the state, he completely accepts the reality the state has created for him. It's scary, and makes me very grateful we can question the public record and reality as you do here.
I remember a prediction not too many years ago where someone said in the future we'd want (and more greatly value) a digital copy as opposed to the original. At first, this made no sense to me and then I recall when it did make a lot of sense. It wasn't about ownership so much as utility and control of the image and other information about the artifact. Well, a step further away from old-school reality (and toward a contemporary version of same) is believing that the public record is an extension of that newer, essential, but more elusive reality.
Yeah I think of this the same way in which audiophiles were in an uproar when mp3s came out. Music was being compressed and audio quality was getting trashed and experts lamented and people created napster and limewire so that this new portable music format could germinate and grow. Now we have Spotify, Tidal, and all the others and kids today don't even know what an mp3 is. It's just a song.
I think people record is the museum, documentary film, news media......all the mass media. These mass media collect public memory. And the media is the message.
There are easy things to define as public record: government publications, works of art and literature in the public domain.
You are right, however that beyond that it gets tricky. I also think you are correct that public trust and public record go hand-in-hand. Is the public record simply what endures? What about records in an archive which never see the light of day?
This made me think of 1984 and how the protagonist's job is to manufacture public record to support the totalitarian regime. He can barely fathom reality because he's part of the machine that destroys and recreates it. In the end, once he's broken by the state, he completely accepts the reality the state has created for him. It's scary, and makes me very grateful we can question the public record and reality as you do here.
I really should read that book ... Thanks for your response. I've been stuck thinking about this idea for the last couple of days.
I remember a prediction not too many years ago where someone said in the future we'd want (and more greatly value) a digital copy as opposed to the original. At first, this made no sense to me and then I recall when it did make a lot of sense. It wasn't about ownership so much as utility and control of the image and other information about the artifact. Well, a step further away from old-school reality (and toward a contemporary version of same) is believing that the public record is an extension of that newer, essential, but more elusive reality.
Yeah I think of this the same way in which audiophiles were in an uproar when mp3s came out. Music was being compressed and audio quality was getting trashed and experts lamented and people created napster and limewire so that this new portable music format could germinate and grow. Now we have Spotify, Tidal, and all the others and kids today don't even know what an mp3 is. It's just a song.
I think people record is the museum, documentary film, news media......all the mass media. These mass media collect public memory. And the media is the message.
There are easy things to define as public record: government publications, works of art and literature in the public domain.
You are right, however that beyond that it gets tricky. I also think you are correct that public trust and public record go hand-in-hand. Is the public record simply what endures? What about records in an archive which never see the light of day?
In short, I really don't know.