I must confess that I wasn't really looking to do a shot of my new scanner, despite the fact that it deserves one much more than my old one did. I had intended to take a shot of somewhere on the way to picking it up, grabbed the 40D, threw it into the car, lined up a shot while I was on the road and read those fateful words "No CF Card".

And so, the scanner you get.

As I mentioned in the shot of my previous scanner I've been time-limited on PBase recently while trying to scan my past into digital form ahead of my pending move. As I was doing so I came across another of the concepts discussed in the book that I referred to in my earlier post, The Future Of Looking Back. That has to do with two characteristics of physical artefacts; the way they change over time, and the association that's created by the fact that people from the past once held them. (Some PBasers have also mentioned this in their own shots when discussing the difference between physical and digital books, specifically with regard to books which may once have been owned by distant relatives.)

There is perhaps something to this, but I think much depends on context. Some of the documents that I scanned had been written upon (or written by), people who were once an integral part of my day to day life. They are gone now, some gone from the world entirely, some just from mine. And yet however hard I tried to evoke it, the mere physical paper, now decades old, musty and with oxidised staples, could raise no reminder of them. Any "presence" that they had in the physical artefact has long since decayed in line with the decay of the paper itself and the fact that they once touched it and wrote upon it has become immaterial as a result. All that remains is the content that they wrote, and that can be preserved just as well in digital format as physical. (Perhaps better, in fact.)

Of course, this isn't an original of the Magna Carta that we're talking about, nor even a leather bound first edition book from the 1700's. Such things clearly have a resonance that makes their physical preservation a worthwhile exercise. But for day to day documents... I do think that they reach an expiry time when they no longer have value in physical form, and they lose the connection to their origins.

1500 (mostly double sided) sheets and counting, an accumulation of decades of life, now just 1's and 0's. And I'm actually quite OK with that.

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