That Which We Leave Behind

Wandering, as my Papal mind is apt to do when Morthos and Hieronymus get into their unique mud-wrestling debating style, I thought two things that may, or may not have been, contrary, possibly even contradictory (although that later attribution I think is incorrect in several war-creating senses).
The first thought was due to an iterant TSV editor getting in contact with me over some written materials of a few years before. My thought was 'What a pity so much 'Doctor Who' is now lost to us, never to be rescued.'
My second thought, held only a mere five hours later as I got on a ferry (I like to stagger the effects of a common cause so as to appreciate them singularly) was 'Isn't it strange that I don't feel anywhere near the same sense of sadness as to the missing plays of my favourite Greek playwright, Aristophanes?'
Hmm, not so contrary after all. In fact, quite complimentary. Damn.
Anyway...
What is the epistemic difference between missing Doctor Who episodes and the work of one of the greatest Athenian playwrights (and the basis of much British comedy)? It isn't, I hope, a question of worth; I like Doctor Who, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather have the complete works of Aristotle at my hand. But I can't...
I think that last statement is the major difference between the survival (or lack thereof) of the works of Aristophanes, Aristotle (and any other Ancient Greek you would like to mention) and the missing episodes of 'Doctor Who' is that we can reasonably expect to have lost information, major or minor, over the course of near three thousand years. It was a completely different written world, with no real mass-production of texts, everything being hand-written and the contextual nature of most ancient texts meaning that there was little want to keep them even across generations. Information lost in our age, though, is different. We have had the ability to keep screes of data for quite some time now. No other age in human history is so almost completely accounted for, from newspaper records to microfiched government files. The digital age is going to compound this even more.
Take newspapers; we have, in many instances, newspaper archives that go back over an hundred years. One hundred years of chronicled daily activity; compare that to the histories of the Republican period of Rome, where we have several good sources, but nothing approaching the work of several thousand hack writers over the course of a decade in journalism. Not only that, but we have film catalogues, sound recordings and the like all safely stashed away; some of it information we will never use again, or ever have need to. We have become data packrats; we try to collect everything and now, it seems, we actually can. Data is no longer a luxury; the keeping of it seems a necessity.
But sometimes data slips through the cracks and we lose it. With Doctor Who it was a planned effort by the BBC to create more shelf-space in their warehouses. Some films decay beyond the point of reissue due to lack of use. When we lose data like this it becomes noticeable, because data, now, is eternally reused, if possible. The Greeks and the Romans hardly ever repeated the performance of a play after its initial run. Plato wrote his Socratic dialogues for the people of his day; we write history books designed to outlive our very civilisation. Data, now, is very different. We might not be immortal, but our works could be.
When I regret the missing works of Aristophanes I regret that what we kept from that time period never seems as important as that which we lost. This probably isn't true; the good stuff survives, while the crap is quickly forgotten. Unfortunately our not having it makes us value its possible existence all the more. But when I regret the missing episodes of Doctor Who I regret that we literally threw that data away.

--The Pope