Digital, Deprecated

           What risk does the digitization of daily life pose to our cultural history? Data storage is trending towards the temporary, and taking knowledge with it.

            Just last month, I lost 2008. I also lost a few hundred gigabytes of 2007, my old tax returns, and most of my trip to Florida. Thousands of files gone in a minute.

            It wasn’t a house fire. A hard drive I left at home – a backup from an extinct desktop – fell off a kitchen counter. After the fall, every file on the drive was inaccessible.

            Humanity lost nothing important.

It’s the miniature expression of a larger problem. Society is producing more data today than at any other point in history. We’re also storing more data. Photos, documents, games, and movies are all kept digitally rather than physically. The natural consequence of this is that we’re losing more information than ever before, and it’s bad for our culture.

There are many ways that data can be destroyed or lost. One example is deprecating physical storage. You don’t have to look back far into history to find things like floppy disks and cassette tapes that for some people may as well be blank. Readers for these mediums are hard to come by. Not only are they difficult to read, they may also contain corrupted or worthless information. File formats have changed over time; it’s possible that there’s no program capable of reading deprecated file types. Mediums like cassette tapes are also subject to decay. More than very slight physical corruption can make any data unreadable.

Data is also lost because there’s no one to back it up. Companies can go out of business and end up trashing decades of information. Backups fail, archives can be deleted, and servers can crash.

This all leads to a spotty recollection of our time. In an era where we’re generating more information than ever, we’re retaining little of it. Webpages, music, some art, is all being lost because there’s no one to keep it.

The threat is only to the digital. One album that I enjoyed years ago existed exclusively on YouTube. The account was deleted and now, as far as I know, it doesn’t exist anymore. There are ‘lost’ video games which have left almost no trace behind. E-books and videos and short stories have occasionally vanished without from the internet, unarchived.

Archives for online content exist; the wayback machine is an example. But there is no way for the entire internet to be backed up for later retrieval. So we’re left with what we have, which is surprisingly incomplete.