Transience of the Digital Medium
We lament the loss of material things, and try to honor the "old ways" that were more tangible and harder to erase. The digital age comes with it a seeming cheapening of these pieces of information in that they are so easily lost, hidden, stored away, and forgotten. And yet, the digital age is much more like life in a way. It is transient, so easily lost, so temporary and temporal. Death is constant with digital media. There is no lasting, there is no permanence. Everything is in transition, and in almost inconceivable bits and bytes that can be wiped with a misdirected EM pulse, corrupted NAND module, or disk platter failure.
Death is merely transition. How attached we are to the old state, is how heavily we feel the sense of loss. But digital (computer) media is always bound for transition and nothing is guaranteed. In this sense it is very much like life, like reality. And much less an illusion than the "old ways" of information storage that we romanticize.
