Digital Dark Age Could Destroy Our Cultural Record

You may be an cyberspace famous person today , but in 50 age nobody will retrieve you — not because your star faded , but because literally nobody can watch your YouTube vids . If you ’ve ever recede all your digital exposure in a information processing system crash or struggled to open a docx Indian file in Windows 2004 , you know that digital spiritualist is n’t always the best manner to salt away and transfer entropy . Now information scientist are implicated that so much of our info and art is tied up in digital media , a huge portion of our ethnic legacy could shortly be lost forever . Jerome McDonough , an assistant professor of library and entropy science at the University of Illinois , notes that our society has amassed over 369 exabytes of data point , which include art , byplay transactions , and correspondence . McDonough fear that this reliance on digital storage will pass to a “ digital morose age ” in which all this data is destroyed or yield unclear . While the forcible record of previous eras are susceptible to end and disintegration , our digital metier are far more vulnerable :

Contrary to popular belief , electronic data has proven to be much more transitory than books , diary or pieces of plastic art . After all , when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or test to read an 8 - column inch floppy disk ? “ Even over the course of study of 10 years , you’re able to have a rapid enough evolution in the way people store digital data and the computer program they apply to access it that file formats can settle out of date , ” McDonough said . Magnetic tape recording , which store most of the world ’s reckoner backups , can take down within a decade . According to the National Archives vane site by the mid-1970s , only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census : One was in Japan , the other in the Smithsonian Institution . Some of the information collected from NASA ’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is indecipherable and lost forever .

McDonough and other digital archivists are working to discover path to conserve our ethnic bequest , but there are challenge . Proprietary platforms , for example , protect intellectual property , but make a greater jeopardy that the medium will be unreadable to future generation . It may be time to deal a subject area in digital archeology to develop creature to ensure the future readability of medium across all platforms . ‘Digital dark long time ’ may doom some data[Physorg viaFuturismic ]

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