Data Extinction
Technology Review: Data Extinction. [Tomalak's Realm]
The problem is that digital information is, surprisingly enough, less permanent than the old analog stuff. Lots of books from hundreds of years ago survive and are readable today. But how long will our CDs last? And if they last how long will we have readers for them? With a book and with photos, all you need to read it is your eyes. With an old reord, all you need is something to spin it with and a needle. But this digital stuff is different.
“Once you begin to understand what’s going on at a more technical level,” says Smith, “you realize that what’s lost could be catastrophic.” We can count on paper documents to last 500 years or longer, barring fire, flood or acts of God. But digital things, be they documents, photographs or video, are all created in a language meant for a specific piece of hardware; and neither computer languages nor machines age well. The amount of material at risk is exploding: the volume of business-related e-mail is expected to rise from 2.6 trillion messages per year in 2001 to 5.9 trillion by 2005, according to IDC, an information technology analysis firm. Maybe most of those messages deserve to be rendered unreadable, but critical documents and correspondence from government and private institutions are in just as much danger of digital obsolescence as spam.
A couple weeks ago when I was getting ready to install Jaguar on my iMac, I was backing the thing up, and spent some time prowling around some old archive folders, from when I was writing regularly in the late '80s. Some stuff is lost, I know at one time I had the text to a couple of my books saved, but they're not there now. Probably trashed, long ago. I found lots of documents, all the reviews I wrote for MacWEEK and other magazines, and lots of articles. Most were written using old versions of Word; some I could open in AppleWorks, some I couldn't. And I sure don't have a copy of Word 4, for example, around any more. In my case, this is admittedly no big loss, but I did feel a sense of personal loss. Another case is HyperCard; I had lots of HyperCard stacks I worked on in the late 80s and early 90s. HyperCard doesn't run natively on OSX, and I can't get Classic working on my setup, so for now I can't get at that stuff. Lots of the data I have moved to newer databases, but there's still a lot of programming and presentation that I don't have anymore.
This is a long, important article.
“People count on libraries to archive human creativity,” Abby Smith says. “It’s important for people to know, though, that libraries are at a loss about how to solve this problem.” When computer users are saving documents or images, they don’t think twice about making them accessible to future generations, she says. “They need to.”
Though they don't say so in the article, libraries these days are aflood with paper and don't know what to do with it all. Libraries are leading the charge towards digitzation of the world. As Nicholson Baker has pointed out, there's a lot being lost this way, down to the knowledge of the old reference cards.
What a cruel irony it would be if, say, 1,000 years from now our descendents had better understanding of the 19th century than the 21st. I'm afraid that will be the case; it's hard to come away from this article with any other conclusion.
9:36:38 PM Permalink
|
|
