The Digital Dark Age

zygan wrote to mention a Fairfax Digital article about the possibility of a digital dark age, as a result of the increasingly short-term lifespan of digital storage. From the article: "It is 2045, he suggests, and his grandchildren are exploring the attic of his old house when they come across a CD-ROM and a letter, which explains that the disk contains a document that provides directions to obtaining the family fortune. The children are excited. 'But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?'"

Comments

I think that..

[slapout]

..a more likey outcome is that patents and DRM will lead to a digital dark age.

Similar issues with old movies

[Alien54]

All too often these are literally rotting away in storage, because the originals are decaying, and the movie companies are unwilling to invest money to rescue them, even though they would sue you for millions if you published these on your own.

Yeah, but so what?

[ottffssent]

The example's contrived. I don't like contrived examples unless they illustrate an important principle, which this one doesn't really do. Such data loss has already started happening even in my own life, but I don't think that's a bad thing. The fairly minimal effort required to keep data up-to-date is a natural impediment to a policy of keeping everything. Data which isn't worth a new hard drive and an rsync dies. Data which isn't worth the effort of importing and re-saving in a newer format dies. This isn't bad. It's not new either.

Data goes the way of the dodo not because of technological obstacles, but because of a decision made or not made to preserve it. We don't know how the great pyramids were built, the obelisks shaped and erected, etc. not because there was no way to preserve that information, but because it wasn't important enough to justify the effort. The same is true of 10-yr-old WP documents I made to bill people when I mowed lawns for spending money, or a million other things that get saved or trashed every day.

If you're serious about the problem, then it's not a technical hurdle. Data storage is cheap. Emulators are good. Batch document conversion is possible. The problem, if you're willing to call it that is that the benefit has to outweigh the cost. Lowering the cost of data preservation only increases the cost of data searching and real information retrieval. And very quickly it becomes a philosophical argument about the value of preserving irrelevant knowledge in a world that has moved on. Yet the argument is couched in terms of data storage and manipulation which is really the tiniest corner of the issue.