ferroscore.blogg.se

We go from one device to the next and the next one because storage keeps getting so cheap, has twice as much storage the last ones we had.” Journalist and author Cory Doctorow says, “We’re like nautiluses.

Today’s latest and greatest storage medium tends to be utterly useless in just a few years. The problem is largely the short lifespan of digital formats, from CDs to floppy drives to Betamax to VHS to DVDs, ad nauseam. It’s not something that we translated from an analog container into a digital container, but, in fact, it is born, and now increasingly dies, as digital content, without any kind of analog counterpart.” As Google data manager Rick West puts it, “We may know less about the early 21st century than we do about the early 20th century.” Cerf tells Science Friday, “Imagine a 22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin going back to look at the beginnings of the 21st century.” It’ll just be an incomprehensible stew of baffling gifs and broken web links.Īs West notes, this is a new problem: “The early 20th century is still largely based on things like paper and film formats that are still accessible to a large extent, whereas, much of what we’re doing now-the things we’re putting into the cloud, our digital content-is born digital. While any hope for true permanence is of course foolish, computer and data experts are concerned we’re digging ourselves a particularly inescapable hole, an “informational black hole,” in the words of Vinton Cerf. Experts are concerned that this time, now, in the 21st century, may well be the future’s “digital dark age,” with nothing ultimately left behind to tell our story for future generations.

Absent a trip to a hardware archivist or local museum, all this silicon might just as well return to its original form-sand-for all the good it will do. The same will be true for the thousands of digital childhood photos we’ve been taking, and which they’ll be desperate to see. One day the kids will come across a trunkful of these intimate messages on USB thumb drives, hard drives, or solid-state drives-and have no way to read them. Image: Hartwig HKD ( /photos/h-k-d/)Ī parent lit in the glow of a monitor types away late into the night, sending notes to the future for his or her children to read upon reaching an age when they want to know who their parents were, what they thought, and what they felt. Is There Going to Be a Big Hole in History Where the 21st Century Was?