I recently wrote about the Kindle, and how the digital distribution of books could mean virtual microruns ensuring nothing is ever out of print, and that pretty much anyone can self-publish for next to nothing.  One of the commenters wrote, “I can’t see how anything that is, or will be, a ‘classic’ book can be enjoyed any way other than with book in hand.”  This is a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by other people as well — that if you truly love a book, you need to own a real, printed copy, or that anything worth watching on TV is worth owning on DVD, or that it’s OK to download a lot of pirated music, but you always have to pay — or even buy the CD — if it’s an album you really love.  With a camera loaded with film, you think long and hard before you take a shot; with a digital camera, you can take hundreds of shots willy-nilly, toss out the duds and frame the best ones later (I’ll ignore, for the moment, the temporary permanence of digital picture frames).  There’s a sense that certain works are of a high enough calibre that they deserve to be enshrined in the form of physical manifestation.

The counterpoint, of course, is that everything else can be distributed digitally, consumed, and then deleted.  Naturally, if you’re going to discard something, it’s far better to be able to delete it than have to actually throw it in the garbage: plastic discs or pulpy paperbacks clogging the landfills of the world.  But if something that’s crappy doesn’t deserve anything more permanent than digital distribution, does it follow that anything digital is inherently disposable?

The human tendency to want to enshrine images or ideas of value in a tangible form is only natural; since we were troglodites, we have made physical recordings of events (both historical and fictive) that we wanted to share or to keep in memory.  It’s only very recently that the media we were working with became intangible; even the impermanent media, like newspapers, were still physical objects.  We’re so used to creating physical copies of media there’s still a sense that deeming something unfit for recording in physical form is the same as saying the idea itself is valueless.

Of course, just because some things aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on doesn’t mean that everything distributed digitally is worthless … does it?  You can find the entire works of Shakespeare online — but then, you can find expensive leatherbound copies as well.  Presumably, as long as something has achieved validation in book or DVD or CD form, that validation can’t be diluted no matter how many digital copies are made.  If an editor somewhere decided to print some books, at least it has that editor’s stamp of approval.  But a book released digitally?  Hell, anyone can do that.

I sometimes worry if perhaps we’re headed down the slippery slope.  Of course, everything is backed up in hard copy somewhere, but our patterns of distribution and consumption are definitely flowing towards the non-physical media.  I don’t even remember the last CD I bought (although I have paid for lots of music online).  I’m stuck buying DVDs for now, but assuming I had a subscription to (for example) Netflix and could stream all the movies I wanted for a monthly fee, I’d stop buying DVDs too.  The trouble with digital books is addressed in the post I link to above, but I believe those problems will be overcome soon, and the majority of our newspapers, magazines and books will be replaced with a single digital reader with the features of the Kindle.  Buying something physical is such an investment — not only of materials, which are finite, but also money (they tend to cost more) and especially time.  I don’t expect us to stop making physical media in my lifetime, but I do expect the ratio of physical to digital to skew radically towards the latter.  As tangible media are gradually phased out, and all we’re left with is the digital, how will we know the good from everything else?

If that happens, perhaps that sense of devaluation will come with it.  Sure, you can download Shakespeare to your iPhone whenever you want, and delete it when you’re done with it — but does that put Shakespeare on the same level as (off the top of my head:) Shot at Love with Tila Tequila?  Do the words “classic,” “timeless,” and “enduring” mean as much when you’re talking about classic, timeless, enduring YouTube clips?

And can any work of art created with the intention of releasing it solely in digital form ever be considered a classic?  If Shakespeare were alive today, self-publishing on his website, would we see him in the same light?  Or does the fact that one couldn’t pick his works up and use it to (off the top of my head:) press flowers cheapen them somehow?  Make them ephemeral?  Frivolous?

I’ve asked a lot of questions here; I don’t have any answers.  Maybe someone will provide some insight in the comments section.  It worries me; I think we run the risk (have the opportunity?) of becoming a near-totally digital culture, totally democratising and levelling production and access to all forms of media.  There will, of course, be a Darwinian battle for popularity, and the highest-quality texts will, by and large, rise to the top … but how will this be established?  Lifetime number of downloads?  User reviews on a scale of 1 to 5 stars?  Is there anything more enduring we can come up with to elevate future works of value?  Will the classics of tomorrow be doomed to exist solely in the shuffling terabytes of binary?