Historians Fear 21st Century Will Be 'Black Hole'

[Logan Westbrook]

Historians Fear 21st Century Will Be 'Black Hole'

The British Library has expressed concerns that the way we use technology will leave future generations in the dark.

Our conversion to a digital society is worrying many librarians, as images, information and correspondence that would have endured through the ages in previous generations instead sits as a clutch of binary code on a hard drive, unseen and usually unpreserved.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library said, "Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft; I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It's tragic."

As technology improves and older devices become obsolete, the information stored within runs the risk of becoming lost. The BBC's Doomsday Project of 1986, intended as a record of the state of the nation, was recorded on 12" video disks for example and only survives today thanks to a specialist team rescuing it in 2000.

The British Library has plans to compile an archive of 'notoriously ephemeral' material from UK websites, a monumental task to say the least, and have worked with Microsoft to unlock millions of files created using now defunct operating systems. They've also managed to get government agencies to cooperate by storing e-mails at the National Archives at Kew.

Some historians however, are worried that in our efforts to preserve the important information, we're in danger of being saddled with a lot of digital detritus. Tristan Hunt, of Queen Mary College in London said, "It's essential that mainstream institutions such as the National Gallery or the White House or the Ministry of Defence keep email correspondence... On the other hand, we're producing much more information these days than we used to, and not all of it is necessary. Do we want to keep the Twitter account of Stephen Fry or some of the marginalia around the edges of the Sydney Olympics? I don't think we necessarily do."

Source: The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/25/preserving-digital-archive]



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[Jack and Calumon]

Somehow, I partly agree with the above post.

 

[Washboard]

who cares???

People saying things like this make me worry ...

 

[kaziard]

meh ill be dead or incontinent by then so bring on tha darkness!

 

[GothmogII]

Personally, I think it's important to keep a record of -all- information, rather than just the stuff that makes us look good. And besides...get rid of the miscellany, and how will people in 7000 years what we were -really- like? After all...didn't a lot of info we have on the people of the Roman Empire and such come from the graffiti they left on the walls aswell as their records?

 

[KaZZaP]

Are all computer going to be wiped out in the next few years? And what about digital photo printers, or just regular printers. Sounds like techno paranoia from 75 year old librarians.

in 7000 years

You really think we're gonna last that long?

 

[curlycrouton]

Society moves on, we'll deal with it somehow.

 

[FallenPrism]

I've always wanted to be mysterious...Maybe I'll be an archaeological study in a few hundred years. It won't be a very interesting study, but still.

 

[Iron Mal]

While I do think we should keep reccords and 'relics/artifacts' of what has happened I don't think that we've neglected to do this in this day and age.

Computer hard drives, Compact Discs, DVD/Bluray, digital photos, memory sticks...the list goes on, it is safe to say that we have plenty of ways of keeping track of the many events that have happened in the interest of telling future generations what happened 'back in the day' (while they sit on the chair next to you, wishing you'd shut up while they play Halo Wars 6 on their Xbox-portableXIV).

 

[Logan Westbrook]

who cares???

Seriously?

Personally, I think it's important to keep a record of -all- information, rather than just the stuff that makes us look good. And besides...get rid of the miscellany, and how will people in 7000 years what we were -really- like? After all...didn't a lot of info we have on the people of the Roman Empire and such come from the graffiti they left on the walls aswell as their records?

Indeed. I have Stephen Fry on my twitter feed and it's fascinating.

Are all computer going to be wiped out in the next few years? And what about digital photo printers, or just regular printers. Sounds like techno paranoia from 75 year old librarians.

Have you ever tried playing System Shock 2 on an XP machine? You can do it, but it's difficult to get it working, I imagine it's even harder on Vista and probably downright impossible on Windows 7. This may seem like a tangent, but it highlights the issues concerned with the speed that technology moves out. In ten years time, we will probably have abandoned the media we are using today, along with the capacity to play it, apart from specialists.

Also, how many of your digital photos do you actually print out? I hardly ever print mine.

 

[J-Man]

Society moves on, we'll deal with it somehow.

Agreed. We have information on the Romans, and they didn't have our conventional means of information storage.

 

[PuckFuppet]

I actually heard of that Project, and what happened with it. I seem to remember something very similar occurring when the BBC produced a series of educational documentaries, intended for use in class to help the education system. It was a complete failure because by the time documentaries had been made, had 12"'s created for them and distributed most 12" players were defunct.

Overall I'd be forced to agree. For some inexplicable reason most people today seem to cling to the notion that "nothing will ever change", best example being a recent discussion I had with another person on 1984(George Orwell's, not the year) she claimed it was "ridiculously stupid" when I asked why her answer was this "because people today challenge their leaders, why would that mindset change?".

 

[The_Prophet]

Are all computer going to be wiped out in the next few years? And what about digital photo printers, or just regular printers. Sounds like techno paranoia from 75 year old librarians.

in 7000 years

You really think we're gonna last that long?

We will be lucky if we last 15 years

 

[HobbesMkii]

Society moves on, we'll deal with it somehow.

Agreed. We have information on the Romans, and they didn't have our conventional means of information storage.

Dude, what the historians are saying is that much of the information we record today will be inaccessible not because the tech of the future will be steps ahead of us, but because it's being preserved in a digital format. The fact is, when modern civilizations began to look back and rediscover ancient civilizations they were still working with the same methods: Pen & Paper, Chisel & Stone, whatever, the point was: this information physically existed. You could pick up the parchment Caesar had written on. You had to go a destroy it with fire or tear it up, not just point and click to get rid of it. We can talk about data reclamation, but let's be frank, at some point it will be equivalent to teaching someone well-versed in calculators to use an abacus or a slide-rule (less actually, because future generations will have to go into it not even knowing what the hell a slide-rule is). Hell, MS-DOS is out of some people's comprehension and we're only up to Windows 7 for Pete's sake. Historians talk a lot about how much of recorded information has come down to us purely because books exist and it takes sincere effort to get rid of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. Just lying around in jars for us to find.

So yah, when we switch to a completely digital society, lots of this stuff may not be saved. Think about movies. How many old movies are really surviving the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? I'm sure that many old movies are being lost, and will die when the last VHS player is destroyed. I know there are LPs that you can't get in a digital format. So when new stuff is being created in a totally digital format that will soon become obsolete, you have to wonder: Will this be around in 500 years? 100? 50? 20? It doesn't look good.

 

[GothmogII]

Society moves on, we'll deal with it somehow.

Agreed. We have information on the Romans, and they didn't have our conventional means of information storage.

Dude, what the historians are saying is that much of the information we record today will be inaccessible not because the tech of the future will be steps ahead of us, but because it's being preserved in a digital format. The fact is, when modern civilizations began to look back and rediscover ancient civilizations they were still working with the same methods: Pen & Paper, Chisel & Stone, whatever, the point was: this information physically existed. You could pick up the parchment Caesar had written on. You had to go a destroy it with fire or tear it up, not just point and click to get rid of it. We can talk about data reclamation, but let's be frank, at some point it will be equivalent to teaching someone well-versed in calculators to use an abacus or a slide-rule (less actually, because future generations will have to go into it not even knowing what the hell a slide-rule is). Hell, MS-DOS is out of some people's comprehension and we're only up to Windows 7 for Pete's sake. Historians talk a lot about how much of recorded information has come down to us purely because books exist and it takes sincere effort to get rid of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. Just lying around in jars for us to find.

So yah, when we switch to a completely digital society, lots of this stuff may not be saved. Think about movies. How many old movies are really surviving the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? I'm sure that many old movies are being lost, and will die when the last VHS player is destroyed. I know there are LPs that you can't get in a digital format. So when new stuff is being created in a totally digital format that will soon become obsolete, you have to wonder: Will this be around in 500 years? 100? 50? 20? It doesn't look good.

Actually, all of these things -do- have preservation societies dedicated to them...movies for example have the National Film Registry. I think the gist of the article, is that for other things such as photos, diaries and other personal artifacts -aren't- being backed up by the people who own them. That is, nowadays a lot of people have a blog rather than a diary, digital photos rather that printed copies. However, not many people take the time to make hard copies of these or back them up.

However...I don't agree that it's the 'digital age' that is causing this, but rather that not enough people are taking the initiative to preserve these things.

 

[guardian001]

If anything the digitization of information has made it easier to collect and archive data. Yes, old technology will become obsolete, but not before people make converters to help information jump the gap in the technology. The only things that won't be carried over as technology evolves are the things people either forgot about long ago or never cared about in the first place.

So yah, when we switch to a completely digital society, lots of this stuff may not be saved. Think about movies. How many old movies are really surviving the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? I'm sure that many old movies are being lost, and will die when the last VHS player is destroyed. I know there are LPs that you can't get in a digital format. So when new stuff is being created in a totally digital format that will soon become obsolete, you have to wonder: Will this be around in 500 years? 100? 50? 20? It doesn't look good.

Actually it does look good. many old movies are being brought over to DVD, Analog-Digital converters exist and are easy to find, and there are digital turntables available that will record Vinyl albums to your computer. The thing about technology is that for it to stick it needs to be backwards compatible. Every time a new media format comes out, people take the old media and convert it. for the media that isn't converted by companies, people make converters. If people care enough to want it to exist further, it will. Written works are transcribed to hard drives around the world, Audio is re-recorded, and Video is converted, and often improved in the process. Technology isn't killing history, it's saving it. What could easily have been destroyed by a flood, rain, fire, wind, exposure, etc., is now preserved over the internet, existing simultaneously on millions of computers around the world, instead of a single copy in a glass case, Available to anyone who wants it, when they want it.