Digital Dark Ages
No, I’m not talking about the dark days of the digital world when Windows 3.1 ruled the PC world. I am referring to a phenomenon that may occur when people will regret, or at least reconsider the value of, moving to an entirely digital world. While reading an article on SlashDot about the viability of burned CDs I was reminded of a problem that has concerned me since my days as a History student at UGA.
Historians rely on documents to reconstruct the past. I had one history professor say that historians, “dabble in documents.” The problem that I see is forming involves the volatility of data stored in digital formats. In the past two years I have had to replace four hard drives. I am fairly diligent in keeping backups of all my important data, but with the simultaneous crashing of two hard drives on different computers I ended up losing about three months worth of photos, email, and other documents. Not a huge loss, but on a larger scale the impact on future historians could be catastrophic. Couple that with the trend toward digital photography, email, instant messaging, etc. it’s clear that much of the material historians use to analyze history are becoming recycled electrons. Hard copies are seldom if ever made of these transient means of communication, and without these the jobs of historians and genealogists will be much more difficult.
I am concerned that unless more people become aware of this issue the digital age may be as difficult for future generations to understand as the dark ages are today.
I have a good friend who compiles video family histories for things like weddings and graduation parties. Everytime he does this he give the customer a couple of DVDs to watch and have for general use. He also give them the original digital tapes of the raw video in a static resistant bag and tells them to put it in a safe deposit box for safe keeping.
I totally see your point about the value of a hard copy. At work we rely on a digital “map” of the city to tell where all of the lines are running and how they are spliced. occationally this map crashes and there are a bunch of engineers just standing around waiting for it to be fixed. The ironic thing is that some older parts of the city still have a papaer record and we can access the paper records if needed and still keep working. As you put it, there could be a digital dark age for a lot of the work that we did in the last decade even though earlier work is still availible.
Thanks for the post. It gave me something to think about as far as my work and my personal journals.