Print on paper is a little like democracy: the worst possible system except for all the others. Books are fragile, they are bulky, they are not easy to search through. They are certainly not suited to computerization. Yet printed volumes have endured half a millennium as readable as the day they came off the press, whereas digital data a mere 30 years old may have vanished past hope of retrieval.The film Into the Future: On the preservation of knowledge in the Electronic Age is itself an object lesson in how fast digital information becomes obsolete. One of the pioneering interactive-media companies whose workers and products appear on screen ceased operations shortly after being fihned. All the software whose images define "the Internet" is long since replaced.How fast do archivists have to run to stay in the same place Just plain data must be recopied onto new media every 10 years to stay ahead of physical deterioration and the junking of machines that can read outdated formats. Given this galloping obsolescence, it seems ironic that the film’s creators should have devoted a significant part of its time to the digitizing of paper archives. And yet they -and we -have no choice: the digital bug has infected us all, and interactive multimedia, with indexed and linked text, pictures and sound, have a convenience and impact that make conversion irresistible.The growing popularity of the World Wide Web offers some hope that publishers and archivists can format both old and new data in ways that will remain understandable for decades rather than months. But the Web brings its own complications. New, undescribed classes of collected information live on the Web in forms that confuse conventional notions of what a document is. How should -or can -such a single separate and independent existence be archived without potentially archiving the entire WebMany Web pages are not even fixed documents in the most basic sense. Two users who ask their Web browsers to open the same "document" may see quite different things on their screens. Besides, the fastest connections on the Internet transmit a mere 45 million bits per second, and so even a single snapshot of the trillion or more bytes available on the Web would take weeks of computer and network time. Meanwhile new sites spring up every day, and some existing sites change their information from minute to minute.In a sense, then, the Web has moved from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian model: it makes no more sense to speak of the state of the Web now than it does to speak of synchronizing clocks located far apart. By the time information has gone from here to there, it is already out of date.It seems strange that a medium intended for the widest possible distribution of knowledge should demonstrate the impossibility of acquiring complete information. Where the Web was once a map for finding useful information in the "real world," it is now a territory where that information, ever changing, resides. When the writer says of "given this galloping obsolescence" (line 3, paragraph 3) he is referring to().

A. films.
B. plain dada.
C. paper archives.
D. obsolete computers.