요약

In some ways, we are more eager to track down and recover knowledge from the distant past than ever. New storage technologies make it possible to preserve texts, images, and music at minimal cost, and social media have made it simpler to share this stored content more widely than ever before. Never have previously produced cultural artifacts and practices been as readily available to as many people as they are now. Yet, amid this digital abundance of cultural content, older file formats, websites, and entire databases are becoming unreadable at a frightening speed, raising the question of whether we're really so much better at preserving the past than our ancestors were. And while the technologies of cultural storage and distribution have changed, the laws governing how culture works ─ how it is preserved, transmitted, exchanged, and recovered ─ haven't. The interplay of preservation and destruction, of loss and recovery, of error and adaptation continues unabated in a world that has put almost all human cultures in constant contact.

→ Digital abundance has not (A) ________ the interplay of preservation and destruction, which continues (B) ________ in a world of constant contact.