Louise Naunton Morgan, is the founding “human printer” behind the project and was inspired by the desire to reclaim some of the lost art of production. “Today technology plays a huge role in everyday life…we have constructed these machines to aid our lives, making simple productions/tasks easier to accomplish. Our environment is now scattered with machine made artefacts, computer developed images and autonomous interactions – We are loosing the essence of human production and craft to the machine, resulting in a soulless utilitarianism.”
(KK OUTLET)
While there have been huge benefits to society from the digital revolution, especially in terms of the accessibility of information, there are a number of concerns. Expanded powers of communication and information sharing, increased capabilities for existing technologies, and the advent of new technology brought with it many potential opportunities for exploitation. The digital revolution helped usher in a new age of mass surveillance, generating a range of new civil and human rights issues. Reliability of data became an issue as information could easily be replicated, but not easily verified. The digital revolution made it possible to store and track facts, articles, statistics, as well as minutia hitherto unfeasible.
From the perspective of the historian, a large part of human history is known through physical objects from the past that have been found or preserved, particularly in written documents. Digital records are easy to create but also easy to delete and modify. Changes in storage formats can make recovery of data difficult or near impossible, as can the storage of information on obsolete media for which reproduction equipment is unavailable, and even identifying what such data is and whether it is of interest can be near impossible if it is no longer easily readable, or if there is a large number of such files to identify. Information passed off as authentic research or study must be scrutinised and verified. With such massive proliferation of information it became possible to write an article citing wholly false sources, also based on false sources.
These problems are further compounded by the use of digital rights management and other copy prevention technologies which, being designed to only allow the data to be read on specific machines, may well make future data recovery impossible. Interestingly, the Voyager Golden Record, which is intended to be read by an intelligent extraterrestrial (perhaps a suitable parallel to a human from the distant future), is recorded in analog rather than digital format specifically for easy interpretation and analysis. (Wikipedia - Digital Revolution)
(Wikipedia Page :Digital environments)
Information Sharing And Privacy
The Internet, especially the WWW in the 1990s, opened whole new avenues for communication and information sharing. The ability to easily and rapidly share information on a global scale brought with it a whole new level of freedom of speech. Individuals and organisations were suddenly given the ability to publish on any topic, to a global audience, at a negligible cost, particularly in comparison to any previous communication technology.
(Wikipedia Page :Digital environments)
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