With our society's increasing reliance on digital storage, it occurred to me the other day that all the sounds and images we're amassing and storing will—in all likelihood—be irrevocably lost to future generations because of the unstoppable pace of technological change that's barreling down upon us. Not even the NSA itself will have access to the petabytes of data they're amassing in fifty years unless it's constantly refreshed and translated to the latest formats. And I seriously doubt anyone's got time for that.
The ancients knew what they were doing. Stone tablets—barring their outright destruction—last for millennia. Paper can last for centuries if properly curated. Digital media…not so much. If "bit rot" alone doesn't rob our descendants of our history, the mere fact that all the formats currently in use will no doubt be obsolete and unreadable in less than the span of a human lifetime.
This is already a becoming a problem. Have you ever tired to open a document created in the original version of WordPerfect? (Is WordPerfect even still a thing?) Yeah, a basic text editor can still pull out the important information, but the time required to remove the machine code and reformat that information into its original form is horrendous. I ran into this recently while trying to retrieve the Journals I'd written in the late 80s and early 90s.
Don't even get me started on image formats or anything done in old desktop publishing programs. Anyone remember Ventura Publisher? Just try to open one of those documents. Good luck.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in our rush to digitize the world and the ease it's provided in recording the minutiae of our lives (anyone remember the limit of being able to record only 12, 24, or 36 images at a time on film?) we're ultimately in danger of losing it altogether.
I confess—I still use WordPerfect. Also, I publish my genealogy research in book form to better ensure its survival.
Urspo—I doubt if WordPress or Blogspot will exist in 5 years.
"These times, they are a changin'" was the mantra of so many decades, and it still remains.
I still print out important papers etc. Data and tech is not permanent.
With that said I want to publish my blog in a book, so it doesn't go ka-boom in a WordPress shut down and meltdown.