May
14
Countdown To The Digital Dark Age
May 14, 2009 | 2 Comments
If the tipping point as finally arrived for the publishing industry, then we have already dipped into a possible fate called The Digital Dark Age – one of my greatest fears.
From The Long Now Foundation:
“In a time of accelerating technology, accelerating history, and a dangerous shortening of civilization’s attention span, the role of libraries becomes deeper than ever. Libraries need to be rethought in the new context and in the light of civilization’s now-global and very long term responsibilities. Some new initiatives need to be set in motion. The conference participants will address needed directions for such initiatives. According to Stewart Brand, co-chairman of the Long Now board, “We want to jump-start some serious, collaborative thinking about how to see information – the real narrative of civilization – in very long-term ways. We’re talking in part about technology, but it goes much deeper, right to the root of why we are here, what we’re doing, and what kind of legacy do we want to leave to our descendents and to their successors.”
Remember those floppy disks we stored our college papers on? Can you even find a machine to read those things now? No, you cannot, and that technology was invented in our lifetime. If we lose a great volume of our paper books and store much of our literature and information digitally, that information may remain intact for quite a long time, but we may not be able to access any of it. Thankfully, there are bright people out there doing their best to lessen the impact of the digital dark age. The good folks at the Internet Archive are doing their part, as are the innovators at the Long Now Foundation’s Long Server project which directly addresses the issue of digital continuity, as well as the Rosetta Disk project (also a Long Now gig) which seeks to preserve world languages (so that we don’t lose the ability to read texts whether they are digital or not).
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
But still…
Hold your breath, we’re tipping under. Or are we?
Escaping The Digital Dark Age
By Stewart Brand
Published in Library Journal vol. 124. Issue 2, p46-49
6-20-3
Due to the relentless obsolescence of digital formats and platforms, along with the ten-year life spans of digital storage media such as magnetic tape and CD-ROMs, there has never been a time of such drastic and irretrievable information loss as right now. If that claim seems extravagant, consider the number of literate people in the world and how much work is “knowledge” work, which increasingly means computer work. The world economy itself has become digital. This is a civilizational issue… [The rest, here.]
Comments
2 Comments so far
[...] senses but in different ways) and it WILL indeed be less expensive. My only concern is that pesky “digital dark age” issue (one of our best posts ever in my opinion is our piece on the digital dark age – check [...]
[...] write here often about the digital dark age in which we are carelessly placing our future. I am concerned more than ever now that we are [...]