SHAWVILLE, QUEBEC | The drive to convert to digital is based mainly on economics. From e-mail and e-books to e-praying and e-music, the "e" makes it cheaper, and that's the big sell.

E-mail is also quicker and more convenient to organize and manage than sheets of paper. E-products can also be fun and portable, but it's economics that's driving all this.

Newspapers may some day not be papers but electronic versions of the news, driven by the cost of paper, printing, and distributing a bulky item to so many households. Same for books, and who knows what else -- people shop, date, study, and do research electronically, and their cost is the price of electricity. (We rarely count our time, the cost of equipment, or the cost of printing out an article or novel we've downloaded.)

Nothing strange here, is there?

Money talks and money makes the decisions. We shop at big box retailers at the expense of our local shops because the big ones are cheaper. We e-shop for airline tickets, clothing, even food, because it's cheaper (and sometimes convenient).

Yet one of our most common truisms is "you get what you pay for." Are we getting what we pay for in the e-world, when our cost is pennies?

That's not a rhetorical question. Are we deliberately trying to get less, to get poorer quality, to get poorer worksmanship? If we only get what we pay for and we insist on paying less -- are we insisting on getting less?

This seems a ludicrous conclusion.

When we convert everything to its electronic format, we are doing this to pay less -- and we are getting less. Less paper and envelopes, no hard book-covers, and also less in comparison to everything in the past. Think for example of what we have preserved of, and what we know of, past societies. We have their books, cuneiform tablets, sculptures, paintings, all the cultural artifacts that tell us about the societies that came before us.

Future societies will be in our position, trying to figure out who we were and what we discovered, created, or composed. None of us will be around to explain in two thousand years, just as there are no Sassanids to explain ancient Persian culture today. But we have thousands of pieces of their pottery, armor, sculpture, etc. What will future anthropologists have of our culture?

Here's a scenario: future scientists will have noted that our period, the Second Millennium, was hit by many solar flares and storms. One wiped out the power grid of much of Quebec just before the Millennium. That was the first modern solar storm. These storms became so bad that a series wiped out all the world's electronics one weekend in the year 2106 (for example). The future researchers will have nothing in their museums except blank CDs, cassettes, and empty hard drives -- our e-culture will be a blank.

The researchers will shake their heads and remark, "We don't know what they accomplished, but the Twenty-first Century sure got what it paid for . . . nothing."

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Copyright © 2009 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/04.09