I attended a wedding yesterday. Between the professional photographers and the guests, there were a shitload of people taking photos. A few guests had digital SLRs, there wee a number of "prosumer" pocket cameras and a lot of people using cell phones.
At a wedding back in the day, there probaby would have been half that many people with cameras. And all of those photos would have been printed, possibly in duplicate. Now, while people take a lot more pictures, probably one percent of those, maybe fewer, are ever printed. So one might argue that digital photography has had a positive effect on reducing the use of chemicals and paper.
However, unless people back them up repeatedly, they're far less permanent. Nobody's going to discover a shoebox of photo CDs in a great-grandparents' house in 2095. Even if they do, the CDs will be unreadable, both from degradation and from a lack of hardware with which to view them.
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http://myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com/
As someone who has done 8x10 large format...the negative or slide is 8" by 10", with a rez of about 750 megapixels, I have to admit it's over. In terms of working for people, digital is better by 3 orders of magnitude.
It isn't the same and in some ways it's not as good, but film is gone the way of buggy whips, cassettes and VCR
The same applies to letters and diaries. We send emails and write on our Facebook today. I came across letters that my grandfather wrote to an uncle during WW2, negotiating for the sale of the property that my mother was raised on. There will never be any such letters found from my generation, we all communicate by email, and by the time we're dead and buried either our email will have crashed and burned in one of the inevitable disk crashes that seem to eventually eat all digital data today other than data explicitly archived onto new media as old media goes bad (and who does that other than a few of us obsessives? Not to mention that some things end up going missing anyhow!), or our children won't even know how to get it off our computers because it's password protected and such, and if they do get it off our computers, they're more likely to trash them than save them as keepsakes because, really, who views electronic bytes that you can't even touch as keepsakes?
If civilization crashes, archaeoligists attempting to piece things together a thousand years from now will think civilization ended somewhere in the mid 1990's, because there shall be literally no artifact of our existence datable afterwards... no letters, no scrolls hidden in dry caves, nothing. Unless you count all the circular media thingies, which undoubtedly will be dismissed as some sort of artistic fetish because surely nobody would trust actual data to such silly things...
- Badtux the Endtimes Penguin
I've been saying the same thing for years. Nobody is listening.
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