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Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com)
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
I think what's more relevant is that they can't be viewed without special hardware. That's one reason why we're always chasing some kind of optical storage. If you have a sufficiently advanced optical reader, you can adapt it to read other kinds of optical storage... so long as their resolution is lower than your scanner.
What he actually said was "That many of the digital objects to be preserved will require executable software for their rendering is also inescapable." What that seems to say [to me, anyhow] is that without knowledge of the formats, getting meaningful data out will be nigh-impossible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
. . . some very smart people ARE already working on this issue, and have been for a long time. See the Digital Preservation Network and Internet Archive for starters.
It is happening as we speak.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Actually, it has never been. We know precious little of various important aspects of the past, simply because nobody bothered to write "common knowledge" down.
For example, nobody knows how crucifixion really worked. Yes, that thing that's a central element of one of the major religions on the planet is a big mystery. I mean, yes, we know, it's been a painful way of killing people, but we lack the details? Where did they put the nails? For the longest time people thought it was through the hands, until we learned that this could not have been the case for it would simply have torn them off. Did they nail the feet next to each other or across each other? How common were some of the forms, did they actually use the "cross" form in Palestine? Are Christians wearing the wrong symbol around their necks and they should be wearing a T-shaped pendant instead?
The same applies to Hanging, Drawing and Quartering. We have a general idea what it entails, but the details are elusive. Especially considering the "drawing" part.
Especially when it comes to things of everyday use and customs we have often very few documents with details, mostly because the authors could sensibly assume that their contemporaries are well used to what these things mean. So while we might mirror various outrageous facts and facets of our lives and that of celebrities, with a detail never seen before, future generations will certainly wonder about the meaning of certain memes and references to them. We needn't explain to anyone what "All your Base" means or what a Rickroll is.
In 200 years, we most likely would have to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.