Ben Macintyre of the Times online has written a piece on archiving digital information in History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry
The digital age brought with it the false promise that everything written, filmed, photographed or recorded might now be preserved, for ever. The “save” key would eliminate the need for filing and storage. Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point. Entire libraries could be preserved on disks that fitted into a pocket. Paper was dead.
It has not quite worked out that way. Digital information may be impossibly voluminous and convenient, but it is also vulnerable and dangerously disposable. Already a vast amount of information has been lost. CDs disintegrate in just 20 years, whereas the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium. Few people still write regular letters, but their replacement, the ubiquitous e-mail, is so easily deleted and forgotten, to say nothing of the fleeting text message.
Found with thanks via Ephemera
April 30, 2007 at 8:08 am
Now this was interesting, and applicable to my own life. I live in Texas, as you know, and my mother lives in Maryland (East Coast of the US). She just does not like computers. But when she goes to visit her closest brother a few miles away, she enjoys reading my blog, viewing my flickr pix, and generally keeping up with me besides talking on the telephone. She loves to see my work. But she is constantly asking me to write her a letter (I’m making her some FPCs), and when I said recently I was going to send her some pix, she said with a note of dread, “on the computer??” (grin). So I try to write every month or so and send her snail mail pix. She much prefers it, and it’s something else for her to save and savor. And I must say that a part of me really appreciates that.