On 23 February 1455 the first book was printed. Of course a Bible. The credit as we know goes to the German Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented the technique for printing with movable type. If I talk about it today it is because that Bible still exists: there are 48 copies around the world, of which 21 complete.
The book, it is evident, is a technology that has lasted for centuries. The same cannot be said of digital. Yet we live in an era in which we feel we can keep everything: the messages we exchange, the photos we take with smartphones, the emails. We save everything to the cloud in hopes of making those files eternal but that’s not the case.
To realize this, just search the net for something ten or fifteen years ago. That website probably no longer exists; and that link indicated on Wikipedia in the meantime leads to an error page; and that image seems to have disappeared. The problem was reported a few years ago by one of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf who spoke of the risk of living a century that will be forgotten, a kind of Middle Ages: in fact, digital continuously updates the way in which it is written, the code, and many documents from the 90s or 80s, if they are still on the net, are illegible. Even what we put on social networks, which for many of us have become a kind of daily diary, will survive the day when today’s social networks are replaced, for example, by those of the metaverse? In this regard, Vint Cerf warned that every time we digitize something to make it eternal it is actually like poking into a black hole. What to do? If you want something to really last over time, Cerf said, print it.