Digital media is potentially immortal. The importance of this, however, is merely relative to the persistence of collective and individual human memory. For example, despite the lack of any physical evidence, it is widely known that the size of Napoleon's genitalia was rather unremarkable. The question of evidence brings us to the more important change technology creates, which is hermeneutic. Circumventing the ambiguities of interpretation, and thereby apparently dispelling all doubt, a video seems to show it as it really is, or was.
Technology thus solves the cumbersome problems of discovering the truth.
If only there were a video of Bill with the girl . As Professor Rosen points out, however, the danger of technology is not its potential to reveal the truth, but rather the opposite, that is its tendency to increase the risk of misunderstanding. Misunderstanding presupposes a context of identity. The fear is that information will be distorted by disjointing it from other information and then grossly superimposing the distortion on an individual's identity. Yet this happens all the time.