Pressing On

Pressing On: The Letterpress Film - Official Documentary Movie Trailer
The rate at which old mechanical technology is being discarded is a little distressing.

I like books and newspapers. They don't require any technological connections in order to use them. Okay, I need my reading glasses, but they don't require any electrical power or batteries or a billion dollar semi-conductor factory to make them.

Being as printing presses are made or iron and steel, they do require the steel-making industry which you might argue was as big in its time as the semi-conductor industry is now.

Books and newspapers are essentially disposable. Yes, you can hold onto a book for years and some books have been around for centuries. Our on-line empire is stored in server farms which are very robust as the data is duplicated on several sites, but the reliability of that storage depends on the robustness of the organization storing the data. Infect an organization with a mental disease and all the data they are safeguarding is sudden at risk of disappearing. And it wouldn't have to be an actual medical disease, it could just be a change in attitude or a new belief, kind of like the way corruption infects some organizations.

The above video is a trailer for the film which has only been shown a few dozen times. I wonder whether they used real film to make the movie, or whether it is entirely a digital creation.

Via Indy Tom.

P.S. My Internet connection was down for at least five hours this morning. It was surprising how annoying that was.