Authors face one ominous challenge. It’s not that stone isn’t available as a medium of preserving ideas. Rather, it’s the fact that humanity has succumbed to communication with an app that transports in electrical charges of ones and zeros; also known by the moniker, “Digital.” AND THUS, the temporal state of electrical charge.
This is a known problem and is well documented, that is, if the documents can be found 50 years from now. Does anyone remember the frantic effort to find the first Website? Turns out, the inventors of the internet have a different version than CERN’s 1989 “First WebPage”. By a margin of 9 years, Tim Bernes-Lee says he produced the first Web page in 1980.
So the question arises, is humanity really going to turn back to writing on stone as the ancient Africans did? Or on papyrus as the ancient Romans did? That’s unlikely in without an ice-age event!
So what’s the next best thing? Paper perhaps? But what of fire and water damage? And what of the trees? That’s a lot of trees!
I suggest the next best thing for writers to preserve their digital works is to find what has lasted the longest without being changed. And then brand your work in that format.
I suggest a two-factor approach:
• Use a non-upgrading writing format, the True-Type-Font (TTF).
– You’ll find this little critter in every crevice of most operating systems: in Windows, in Mac OS, in Android, in Linux and even still thrives on the Web.
– The TTF works on devices 15 years old just as well as it works on the Web today.
– The new Web Font format called WOFF (December 2012) is already the subject of an imminent upgrade, barely three years after debut.
– The TTF is has proved indomitable for a quarter century already!
• Have you name and picture on a branded in a TTF.
– We know how to do that.
– And you play a part in the design as well – your own portrait
We venture to preserve people’s digital memory, not using Data Centers or massive computers. That space will always be created as long as people need to write. So the problem is not storage space, no no . . . The problem is to be remembered.
And so we brand peoples writing on the indomitable TTF as a work of art. We call this initiative #PORTRAITFONT. That’s what we do at KamaHapa.com. Our initiative can be found @ www.kickstarter.com
Wanna chat? Best way is to email me at jinamoja@shaw.ca or say something on Twitter @maasaivatar
