I had to change my passport over the Christmas break. I handed in the various forms to the local post office on the 19th December and the brand new document arrived today, the 27th which is pretty impressive service - less than three working days given Christmas. Seeing the old one, a faithful companion, battered and abused, stained with beer in Auckland, gilt lettering on the front cover worn to the point of illegibility, brought back memories. It now has its wings clipped to prevent reuse and I will miss it.
I got it just after I left IBM just over three years ago and despite getting the maximum number of pages it is so full of visas and customs stamps that there is no capacity for 2008. The pages with their stamps and stickers tell the story of three frantic years of activity and travel getting Cognitive Edge established.
Now I have a blank document, I will appear a novice when I next travel, the respect and sometimes sympathy of homeland security will be no more! The very pretty pictures of raptors and wading birds that decorate each page of the new shiny usurper are small compensation. And it gets worse, my last photograph looked professorial, this one appears to be of a tramp rescued from the streets over Christmas, much the worse for wear.
Artifacts are important for stories, a digital environment is not the same. My old passport will now go in a drawer with my mother's passport from her study in a German University in the years immediately after the second world war. The stamps from the various occupying powers tell a profound story in their own right, let alone that of a working class girl, first in the history of the family to go to University and only there due to a scholarship. She wanted to study German and decided to go to Germany to do so, a few short years after hiding in a bomb shelter in Cardiff as a school girl. My father's documents from his service in India in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, with vaccinations, mess bills and the day to day flotsam and jetsam of life on the North West Frontier (topical as British Troops are still there) are in the same drawer. Also ration books, school prizes and other artifacts whose age is evident from their patina.
I wonder what the artifacts will be for the current generation? The electronic age is fleeting and creates no lasting representation, but surely something physical will be preserved?
Comments (4)
Does the Wayback Machine from archive.org count as preservation? A group of friends and I had a website in the late 90s with a few gigs of digital photos and videos that we thought lost when the hosting company went under, only to find it all again last year using the Wayback Machine.
I suppose going through unlabeled CDRs, USB drives and external hard drives 10 years from now will be interesting for folks as well.
Posted by Curtis | December 27, 2007 7:01 PM
Posted on December 27, 2007 19:01
I have been thinking about artifacts for a long time! As the services business grows I have been more and more envious of people with practical jobs. A Carpenter, a Bricklayer, a Smith, a Carver can show their son/daughter something they have built with their hands. How do you show the number of issues you have handled or the projects you have manged??
Posted by Hanne | December 28, 2007 8:00 PM
Posted on December 28, 2007 20:00
I won't mention your carbon footprint Dave.
('cos my passport seems much like yours.)
Thom Yorke made your point about artifacts - after a very successful on-line-only sale of the last Radiohead album; They still see the need for a "physical" artifact to exist.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20080102_radiohead.shtml
Anecdote ... I've been dealing with architecture and implementation of information and software that support engineering for ten years now, but I have on my desk the largest bolt I could smuggle offsite from the last real engineering project, of my 30 year career to date. Now I know why.
(Which reminds me ... I used to have a large offcut of special steel pressure vessel plate - with sentimental value, honest - until I was forced to dispose of it after is was pointed out it exceeded the floor-loading of the office I was occupying at the time. That's another long story.)
Ian
Posted by Ian Glendinning | January 3, 2008 3:55 AM
Posted on January 3, 2008 03:55
Interesting comments - it also feels like there's a question about real artefacts versus clutter. There's been a long (and frequently justified) battle in workplaces against clutter - the hotdesking trend often being accompanied by a zero-tolerance clear desk policy that I could never comply with - that's worked on the assumption that any artefact is bad.
Yet the ability to distinguish between an artefact that adds value and something that we're just hanging onto seems to be crucial. I like physical artefacts, but while my NY marathon medal feels like it has real value does the WHO office pass next to it have any?
Posted by Tony Quinlan | January 4, 2008 12:07 PM
Posted on January 4, 2008 12:07