OUR EVANESCENT CULTURE - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 85

sculptures, photographs, motion picture films, phonograph records, CDs, DVDs, websites, and on
and on.
But all this volume and diversity may be deceptive. In some respects our culture is arguably
more ephemeral than most others, and a surprisingly large proportion of our cultural materials is in
danger of being swept away with astonishing speed, leaving virtually no trace—like a candle flame
vanishing in a puff of wind. The Egyptians carved their thoughts in enduring stone; we post ours on
websites that change with lightning speed and sometimes vanish altogether.
If we want future generations to have the benefit of our achievements, we should start thinking
more seriously about what to preserve, and how to preserve it.
The Ascendancy of Electronic Media
The survival struggle of America's remaining newspapers is symptomatic of a trend that began in
the 1970s, when computers started finding their way into businesses, schools, and homes. Today
most of us already get our news from the screen, not the local print daily—and the trend is growing.
Just about every newspaper now has a website to accompany its print edition—and many industry
forecasters say the print editions may not survive much longer. Even before the beginning of the
Great Recession, newspaper advertising revenues were declining steeply, and in 2009 alone daily
average circulation for 395 newspapers fell 7.1 percent to 34.4 million (from 37.1 million in 2008). 1
In recent years the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased print news
operations, and both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed for bankruptcy.
Others—like the New Orleans Times-Picayune , the Detroit Free Press , and Detroit News —have
cut back their publishing schedule to only a few days per week or reduced the number of pages in
the average edition. 2
The magazine and topic trades are likewise evolving quickly under pressure from the Internet.
More than three hundred thousand new topic titles still appear in the United States each year, and
the book industry's sales revenue continues to grow; 3 however, many insiders think advances in
digital publishing will force an unprecedented transformation of the industry, as ever fewer topics
are released in print versions and more in online or ebook formats—a trend already sweeping the
academic textbook market.
As with newspapers, most magazines now publish their content online, and some (like The Eco-
logist ) have already gone all-electronic, jettisoning their print versions. Perhaps the most economic-
ally secure of print publications are also the most ephemeral in their content— People magazine and
other fixtures of the supermarket checkout line. And the production processes for books, magazines,
and newspapers—from writing to typesetting, printing, and distribution—are already thoroughly
computerized.
Digitization has nearly completed its takeover of the motion picture, photography, and music in-
dustries. Just try to buy a package of Kodachrome film for your 35-millimeter camera, or an analog
recording of your favorite band's latest songs. 4 And with the explosive growth of online streaming
and downloading services for music, movies, and television programming, the Internet is gradually
becoming the primary delivery medium for visual and audio media.
Libraries are being forced to adapt, as they face enormous pressure to expand digital media at
the expense of traditional media. For archivists, the emerging trend can be summarized in one word:
digitization . Whether the original exists on paper, vinyl, or celluloid, its future lies in endless strings
of ones and zeroes encoded on magnetic or laser-etched media, which will presumably preserve the