Vice
president at Google, Vint Cerf, has warned of a possible “digital dark age” as
technology becomes outmoded and has warned that as tech evolves, it might
become more difficult to access older digital methods of storage.
Cerf
called this the “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” due to a
process he called “bit rot”, meaning our old computer files will eventually
become unreadable and obsolete. Cerf goes on to add, “We don’t want our digital
lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the
digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.”(Cerf
2015)
Cerf
then adds that, “We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could
become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things
because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that
unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and
may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,”(Cerf 2015)
Sample
agrees with this as he writes, “Piles of digitised material – from blogs,
tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and
emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will
become defunct” (Sample 2015). So in this case all of our digital archiving
will become obsolete as the technology becomes more advanced, and there shall
be nothing to show we existed in this time.
Samples
main concern with this “Bit Rot” is that, “To study today’s culture, future
scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file
types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes
hardware too.” (Sample 2015)
Dartnell
agrees with this concern as he states “Plenty of once-great civilisations have
collapsed, and our current industrialised society is by no means invulnerable –
in fact, due to the intricate interconnectedness of production and economies
around the world today, our technological civilisation is perhaps more prone to
a sudden collapse than other societies through history. We buy life assurance
to help provide for those left behind if we die suddenly; surely it is also
rational for us collectively to safeguard our informational heritage,
accumulated over the centuries, to help accelerate the recovery of the society
after our own?” (Dartnell 2015)
Parkinson
states, “This issue of digital obsolescence isn’t a new concern. Cornell
University has even started to keep a list of the tech that is already six feet
under. Cerf’s main point is that future historians will have fewer resources as
redundant tech become inaccessible.” (Parkinson 2015)
Sample’s
article also mentions steps taken towards digital preservation as he states,
“Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have made headway
towards a solution to bit rot, or at least a partial one. There, Mahadev
Satyanarayanan takes digital snapshots of computer hard drives while they run
different software programs. These can then be uploaded to a computer that mimics
the one the software ran on. The result is a computer that can read otherwise
defunct files”. (Sample 2015)
Dartnell
then mentions the steps taken in the United Kingdom “The British Library is
taking bold steps to rectify what it refers to as the “digital black hole” and
since 2004, it has been working to archive websites for future generations,
just like paper-based literature”. (Dartnell 2015)
With
all these points made about how we should preserve what we have created
digitally for future generations Parkinson goes on to argue, “How much of this
is healthy? Is hanging on to emotional artefacts conducive to good mental
health? Why do we keep this stuff? Doesn’t it just pull us into the past?” and
concludes by stating “for us in the here and now it’s probably best to just let
it all go”. (Parkinson 2015)
It would
appear that our fears that have been portrayed on the screen of humanity
becoming eradicated by machines and technology may actually be a reality due to
our relationship with digital archiving and the fact that one day all will
become unreadable and therefore never have existed “All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears…in…rain”.
A 'digital dark age' could help
us let go of the past
Hannah
Jane Parkinson.
February
16th 2015
Google boss warns of 'forgotten
century' with email and photos at risk
Ian
Sample
Friday
13 February 2015 09.16 GMT.
The digital black hole: will it
delete your memories?
Lewis
Dartnell
Monday
16 February 2015 19.01 GMT
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