A couple of things I've seen on-line from some friends on other forums are starting to crystallise into something in the dingy recesses of what remains of my mind.
One was a post from singemonkey on Facebook about a humble, ordinary man who has become a hero of sorts by saving a large number of ancient scrolls from the recent shenanigans in Timbuktu.
Another is post to an closed, old-fashioned email discussion list (that archives all it's postings) about why he prefers physical albums to iTunes and the like.
I buy CDs because the physical medium is owned and acts as a 'carrier' of the listening rights of the music. Thus the listening rights can be bought and sold second hand or left to the family in a will. With a download you own nothing, you only obtain the listening rights which are exclusive to the individual purchaser, they can't be bought or sold second hand and if the purchasing member of a family dies the household music library is not transferable to the survivors.
Which is true. There was a case recently where Amazon wiped out somebody's Kindle library after their demise. The estate made contact with Amazon to get the Kindle transferred into the spouse's name. Amazon said the survivor may indeed take possession of the physical device, but not the content that had been purchased. All you actually get is the right to read that content.
In Auckland Park in Johannesburg there is Lindfield House, a marvellous treasure trove of a house, full of Victoriana. The owner inherited many of these items and also has a love and deep knowledge of that period of history and buys more items as and when she can. You can spend a good couple of hours in that house being shown around, picking things up (under supervision of course), hearing about how they came to be and the implications that they had for people's lives.
In Britain they have the National Trusts (one for England and Wales, one for Scotland) which preserve not only pieces of the countryside but also a large number of properties of historical interest. Not just imposing palaces but smaller, more humble yet still fascinating sites. In Glasgow you can visit Tenament House which is, yes, a tenament. One lady lived in that particular tenament for decades and kept all the records. They have, for example, meter reading books going back decades. The tenament still has gas mantles for lighting and "wardrobes" that actually contain concealed bed. The Scottish trust is able to present a very complete picture of what life was like for the people who lived in that tenament in the the immediate post WW2 years.
A friend of mine in the Netherlands has amassed a huge collection of rock 'n roll and folk music memorabilia which he can leave to his family or to a museum or a university.
Another friend of mine here in Johannesburg has a large collection of books (no bodice rippers, mostly non-fiction) which he will leave to his family. Those books will be two things (indeed they are one of those things already): Reminders of a beloved father, and also a repository of knowledge and information and a record of what people thought and said at specific times and thus how ideas and knowledge grew and evolved.
But we are now moving into a less permanent age, an age in which leaving things for posterity is going to get harder. In Lindfield you can still go into the old study and see not just the record player (wind up, of course) but also the records, all in shelves and arranged in a specific order, AND the catalog that was kept so that one could locate a particular recording. In times to come the ability to create that sort of record and to leave that sort of exhibit will be endangered. Gaps will appear because, as per the quote above, people will not own the right of transfer of physical goods any more, and with time those gaps will grow wider.
All of this bugs me a bit. Think about it, we get away with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Metallica and Weather Report, but what about the next hot thing that comes along, the superstars and the critics favourites of a digital age, the best selling autobiography of 2033. How will we pass the memories and the knowledge of those things down to future generations?
