Google is not the answer: How the digital age imperils history
From floppy disks to thumb drives, we get better at storing things -- while trapping history in obsolete formats
(Credit: Spiderstock via iStock)
Our
species created about 5 billion gigabytes of information from the dawn
of time until 2003. Before long, we will create that much information
many times per day, according to IBM. The problem: No one is doing enough to select and preserve the bits that really matter.
One of the great paradoxes of the digital age is that we are producing vastly more information than ever before, but we are not very good at preserving knowledge in digital form for the long haul. There’s a difference between creating big server farms to store the information somewhere for near-term retrieval (industry is very good at that) and in fact choosing and preserving the data that matters, and being able to render it useful, at some time in the future (something that, scarily, we are not nearly as good at). We are radically underinvesting in the processes and technologies that will allow us to preserve our cultural, literary and scientific records.
Consider the experience of pulling out an old shoebox from under a bed and discovering a series of floppy disks there from the 1980s. Perhaps you smile, thinking of what might be on them; perhaps you shiver. How would you find out? Most of us have not preserved a vintage Macintosh SE to be able to play them back. Data formats have changed multiple times since then. From 8-inch to 5-and-a-quarter inch to 3-and-a-half-inch floppy disks to compact disks to thumb drives, we are continuously making progress in how we store our media — and trapping information in lost formats in the process. Best that you put the box back under the bed and not worry too much about it.
Obsolescence of this kind may, in fact, be a blessing. It’s important that much of the information we create is ephemeral. Otherwise, the world will become far too cluttered. Our behaviors would shift, torqued by the constant surveillance to which we increasingly subject ourselves. We will have an even harder time finding the knowledge that’s important in the vast ocean of the unimportant – much less making sense of it all.
It’s fine when it’s your old term papers that are locked away in an obsolete format. And many blogs, tweets, photos and status updates don’t need to be kept for the long run. It’s not so fine, though, when the lost knowledge has historical significance.
The problem is not that it’s impossible to transfer information from one format to another; with enough effort and cost, most data can be transferred to formats that can be read today. A cloud-based world, to which we are headed, is likely to be simpler to manage than a world of shoe-boxes, floppy disks and thumb drives.
One of the great paradoxes of the digital age is that we are producing vastly more information than ever before, but we are not very good at preserving knowledge in digital form for the long haul. There’s a difference between creating big server farms to store the information somewhere for near-term retrieval (industry is very good at that) and in fact choosing and preserving the data that matters, and being able to render it useful, at some time in the future (something that, scarily, we are not nearly as good at). We are radically underinvesting in the processes and technologies that will allow us to preserve our cultural, literary and scientific records.
Consider the experience of pulling out an old shoebox from under a bed and discovering a series of floppy disks there from the 1980s. Perhaps you smile, thinking of what might be on them; perhaps you shiver. How would you find out? Most of us have not preserved a vintage Macintosh SE to be able to play them back. Data formats have changed multiple times since then. From 8-inch to 5-and-a-quarter inch to 3-and-a-half-inch floppy disks to compact disks to thumb drives, we are continuously making progress in how we store our media — and trapping information in lost formats in the process. Best that you put the box back under the bed and not worry too much about it.
Obsolescence of this kind may, in fact, be a blessing. It’s important that much of the information we create is ephemeral. Otherwise, the world will become far too cluttered. Our behaviors would shift, torqued by the constant surveillance to which we increasingly subject ourselves. We will have an even harder time finding the knowledge that’s important in the vast ocean of the unimportant – much less making sense of it all.
It’s fine when it’s your old term papers that are locked away in an obsolete format. And many blogs, tweets, photos and status updates don’t need to be kept for the long run. It’s not so fine, though, when the lost knowledge has historical significance.
The problem is not that it’s impossible to transfer information from one format to another; with enough effort and cost, most data can be transferred to formats that can be read today. A cloud-based world, to which we are headed, is likely to be simpler to manage than a world of shoe-boxes, floppy disks and thumb drives.
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