>The digital world feels increasingly dangerous and ephemeral. If I have something written with ink on paper I have certain guarantees:
Fair but paper comes with a significant drawback of poor discoverability. I've had to dig through old aerial survey photographs taken before digital photography, and combing through the indexes to find what I looking for was an adventure unto itself. Never would've been able to do it without help from the librarians, and there's only one archive where that information is stored.
And digital format can be more readily altered, but it can also be more easily backed up or have redundancies. There's ways of managing digital's drawbacks, and ultimately I think we're probably better off having digital formats then just reverting to alternatives for the most part.
Fair but paper comes with a significant drawback of poor discoverability. I've had to dig through old aerial survey photographs taken before digital photography, and combing through the indexes to find what I looking for was an adventure unto itself. Never would've been able to do it without help from the librarians, and there's only one archive where that information is stored.
And digital format can be more readily altered, but it can also be more easily backed up or have redundancies. There's ways of managing digital's drawbacks, and ultimately I think we're probably better off having digital formats then just reverting to alternatives for the most part.