Sima Qian chose suffering and mutilation over death to complete his life's work.
The written word can persist throughout space and time. What will happen to our digital archives?
The written word can persist throughout space and time. What will happen to our digital archives?
It stands to reason that Sima Qian, if he cared about posterity, would have submitted his works to people who make it a point on preserving records.
Similarly a person is writing a digital work, they will need to go through a digital analogue of the same process, if they want to preserve their work.
The process of bit entropy acts like digital moths.
In 100 years, a hard drive will degrade without multiple transfers to new media - an active process.
The barrier to digital archival is much higher than paper archival for the average person, and the internet does forget. There's not really an equivalent authority who preserves records for digital works, is there? The Internet Archive works toward this goal, but their mission is not enshrined anywhere permanent and could be gutted.
Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part.
Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.
Who is this "someone", though?
There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.