> What ultimately matters is that information is captured and preserved as thoroughly as possible. Between a picture that expresses a thousand words, and plain text file that sacrifices its detail and authenticity, why wouldn't we choose the former? Indeed, this question applies even the choice may sacrifice the longevity. What's the point of longevity, when the pursuit of it can compromise our ability to capture the information we may be afraid of possibly losing?<p>I would contend that capturing a picture is absolutely a massive distortion of reality because reality is three dimensional, exists in many spectra beyond visible light, has sounds, smells, taste, and feeling, and exists in a historical context. The selection of framing, distance, focus, all of these are biases of the photographer. A photo is a lie, too. Just because it's higher resolution doesn't mean it has indeed captured the right information.<p>Text is a lie too, granted. But in our current digitization zeitgeist, we have forgotten that our media (pictures, video, recordings, not just the TV, cable, and internet) lie to us. Our own bias towards slicing apart the world into computer-digestible bits is just us lying more convincingly to ourselves.