Okay, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.
More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren’t talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn’t a digital process even if you’re literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn’t because they didn’t exist. It’s because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It’s perfectly retrievable until it’s perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.
Okay, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.
More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren’t talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn’t a digital process even if you’re literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn’t because they didn’t exist. It’s because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It’s perfectly retrievable until it’s perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.