Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

I got quite a lot of use out of metadata over the years, such that now I'll probably get a nervous itch and tremors all over my body if I attempt to use just plain text. Specifically, the creation and modification times for each addition to my notes are rather valuable, especially with the work-from-home lifestyle aka ‘day fades into night into day’—with which more people are gonna be familiarized in these years.

Thankfully I'm using Org-mode these days, which is reasonably ‘plain text’ under practical definitions—but I make dozens new headings every week, and each of them is stamped with the creation time. But boy do I miss having modification times too—should probably finally set up automatic commits to Git. Also need to mess with Orgzly so that it marks notes that are created on the phone.

IMO the question is more about which standards are used, rather than specifying an specific format. In particular, using open and free standards and formats increases the chance to retrieve and use data after long time storage. Different formats suit different data types.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in plain text.

As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with.

The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting.

I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation.

We had a very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, and a short grainy video clip of her getting into a plane and smiling and waving.

My question was: Which one of these two media conveys more information about Amelia?

One gave extraordinary detail of her face, eyes, and seemed to many was a much better "fidelity" document. Others noticed that although you couldn't see her face in the video, you could feel from her gait, waving, body language and the way she shook hands _much more_ about her than from the static photo.

Both files are the same size in bytes.

So which one has more "information"? Which one is more "authentic"?

Not to attempt to answer here with a deep dive into phenomenology, but each carries a different kind of information, which can be static, dynamic, or meta-dynamic in higher orders relative to a matrix of assumptions that must be carried forward in parallel by the culture that wants to decode the message later.

I like that Miris tries to explore this by questioning the richness of text. But maybe the question doesn't hold up well under those conditions of investigation - because one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.