The internet is wonderful, and opens up almost infinite possibilities for acquiring and seeking out new information; it’s had a profound impact on how we relate to the universe.

It used to be we had encyclopedias, books, libraries, research information, photos and books in hard copies, but that’s changed so drastically.

Take photography, for example.

We all used to have photos we could see and hold onto. Photos were precious. First of all, you had to buy a certain level camera to take a good photo, and you had to not only buy film, but then you had to develop the photos, or pay someone to develop them for you. This means the photos themselves had an instrinsic value, not only for the moment in time they captured, but also because they literally were worth the dollars you invested in them (not even considering the time it took for you to take the photos).

Fading away?

No more. Photos can be taken by a mobile phone, a tablet computer. You can take a thousand crappy photos and pick one that just happened to capture the exact moment that looks good. In some ways, the transformation of analog to digital photography  allowed almost anyone to call themselves a “photographer.”

I can guarantee you that if you have the most expensive photographic equipment and the fastest lens around, and the merest eye, and you’re willing to sort through all the images, you’ll find something that will convince the uninitiated that you are a “photographer.”

Now we have Instagram and SnapChat. Certainly not a lot of photographic expertise needed to participate in those. And SnapChat photos and videos are made to be deleted.

Moments in time used to be a lot more precious when we had to take the time to record them. Now they’ve become almost expendable.

My mother lost all of our family photos to Katrina, which means that she’ll never again be able to see photos of her children, parents and other family members—and neither will the rest of our family. That was really an incalculable loss. Those memories can only reside somewhere deep inside our brains; it was a tragedy, really.

Yes, they could have all been scanned and reside on the cloud somewhere. But they weren’t. How many of the memories you’ve recorded with photos and videos on your digital devices are really precious to you? Will you have access to them when your computer crashes or you forget to pay your storage bill?

We had a discussion in the office recently about how much information we need to put on our website, OffBeat.com. We tend to want to use the website as a repository of historical information; maybe it will be valuable someday. For example, when writers for HBO’s Treme were doing research on what was happening musically in New Orleans post-Katrina, they used copies of OffBeat to do their homework.

We now put a lot more information onto our website than into our print edition of the magazine. But the web posts are pretty short and sweet; snippets, really (human attention spans have definitely been reduced a result of technology). Our more long-form, in-depth pieces go into the magazine.

If we should lose our electronic version of history, what will we have left? I think we have to look at what we do in a more permanent light: OffBeat’s approach to music coverage is more than digital trash, or selfies;  moments of recorded time, place and people shouldn’t be disposable via the crash of a storage device.

I guess I’m making a decent case for print.

Going through some boxes at the office today, I found a lot of old OffBeat archival materials—old rate cards, envelopes, invoices, promotional pieces, stories, photos. Sometimes it’s not only good to look at the elements of your history; it’s also the measure of progress and improvement and the documentation of change. Personally, I’m glad we still have hard copies and a historical record of the way things used to be—that stuff wasn’t digitally recorded, and a lot of valuable information may never be.

After all, what is a business—or what is humankind–without a demonstrable historical record?