Record keeping; it brings up an image of a cavernous domed ceiling, streaks of sunlight filling a dusty room with rows of books and boxes stacked higher than it is possible to reach. An old man sitting at a long wooden table, with a pair of tiny wire framed glasses half way down his nose, reading something to himself in Latin. All is calm and tranquil, then silence is broken from shouts of German, as a squad of Nazi soldiers pour into the room, followed by a tall blonde leggy woman with a wicked, beautiful smile that hints at pure evil. Indiana Jones may have played a part in how I view records and historical information. The reality is far from that these days, maybe something more of a glass box full of microwaves.
I admit, my nerdy side is overwhelmed and awed by the look and design of modern server rooms. There is a certain appeal to technology, it’s rapid design growth and the constant state of fluctuation. A library that housed centuries worth of research and literature for generations is now an electronic marvel that remodels it’s looks every couple years. Though its true beauty is not design, but what it is designed ‘to do’, the same ‘to do’ that transformed the look of my cherished living room stereo. No longer adorned with a turn table or cd player with a mound of media piled around it, now just a simple little laptop. Hours of sorting and searching for songs and albums now happen in the blink of an eye. A source that could only serve a handful of people in a single room can now serve thousands of people around the world all at the same time.
More important than spreading art and information around the globe, I feel, is the distribution of fact or truth. It is a concept that is always in debate, depending on whom you ask, but I believe real truth is attainable and with our advancement of record keeping and increasing accessibility, very close. Having information at my fingertips has shaped my life on a personal level much more than I could have ever imagined. Once, the fool for believing an urban legend, always the doubter in the future. Of all the preposterous stories I’ve heard, I go and believe KFC is breeding mutant chickens, I must warn my friends! Oh, the shame. My new life motto, “Доверяй, но проверяй”, a Russian proverb saying “Trust, but verify” and with help from the internet, I do.
At no point, do I appreciate this more than around election time. Reading countless articles, being bombarded with commercials and watching laughable debates jumble information stored in your head. Deciphering fact from fiction on the fly is just simply too much to process for the human mind alone, especially with its built-in sense of compassion and trust that needs to be overcome to think rationally. When someone looks you directly in the eye and speaks about a tragic issue that personally affected them in the past, with such conviction and belief, it’s hard to say, “hold on, let me Google that, um… actually no it did not happen like you remembered it”. Websites like FactCheck.org attempt to use this method in refuting political claims and boasts made by egotistical candidates, often times disputing their claims with stored video media of themselves just a little while earlier. As with any information source, they themselves have to be fact-checked, but the general concept still applies.
While we have archived information for thousands of years in various ways. Only now can such a large percentage of people, access such a high portion of it, so easily. It’s often said, “those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it”, but for the longest time it has been so easy to ignore due to a bit of difficulty or laziness. Thanks to huge strides made in just a few short decades, that last bit of difficulty is being erased and that image of a graying elderly scholar sitting in a library, baffled by the sound of his stamp, is being replaced with Ipad wielding hipsters sitting in an organic coffee shop.
