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who cares??? | |
Somehow, I partly agree with the above post. | |
People saying things like this make me worry :P... | |
meh ill be dead or incontinent by then so bring on tha darkness! | |
Personally, I think it's important to keep a record of -all- information, rather than just the stuff that makes us look good. And besides...get rid of the miscellany, and how will people in 7000 years what we were -really- like? After all...didn't a lot of info we have on the people of the Roman Empire and such come from the graffiti they left on the walls aswell as their records? | |
Are all computer going to be wiped out in the next few years? And what about digital photo printers, or just regular printers. Sounds like techno paranoia from 75 year old librarians.
You really think we're gonna last that long? | |
How much do we really know about the people from 700 years ago? Context people - Historians have to work to translate and preserve ancient documents, but future scholars will just need to make thier technology backwards compatable. | |
All important information will be saved one way or another. Dont be paranoid. Technology is our friend-end-end-end-en... [boing] ERROR 553. REPLACE VOICE MODULATOR. | |
Society moves on, we'll deal with it somehow. | |
I've always wanted to be mysterious...Maybe I'll be an archaeological study in a few hundred years. It won't be a very interesting study, but still. | |
While I do think we should keep reccords and 'relics/artifacts' of what has happened I don't think that we've neglected to do this in this day and age. Computer hard drives, Compact Discs, DVD/Bluray, digital photos, memory sticks...the list goes on, it is safe to say that we have plenty of ways of keeping track of the many events that have happened in the interest of telling future generations what happened 'back in the day' (while they sit on the chair next to you, wishing you'd shut up while they play Halo Wars 6 on their Xbox-portableXIV). | |
i am slightly afraid of my DVD collection becomeing obsolee, so i am backing them all up on my hard drive. backwards compatability is a must. as is updating storage. what about micro-fish stoage? | |
Seriously?
Indeed. I have Stephen Fry on my twitter feed and it's fascinating.
Have you ever tried playing System Shock 2 on an XP machine? You can do it, but it's difficult to get it working, I imagine it's even harder on Vista and probably downright impossible on Windows 7. This may seem like a tangent, but it highlights the issues concerned with the speed that technology moves out. In ten years time, we will probably have abandoned the media we are using today, along with the capacity to play it, apart from specialists. Also, how many of your digital photos do you actually print out? I hardly ever print mine. | |
Agreed. We have information on the Romans, and they didn't have our conventional means of information storage. | |
I actually heard of that Project, and what happened with it. I seem to remember something very similar occurring when the BBC produced a series of educational documentaries, intended for use in class to help the education system. It was a complete failure because by the time documentaries had been made, had 12"'s created for them and distributed most 12" players were defunct. Overall I'd be forced to agree. For some inexplicable reason most people today seem to cling to the notion that "nothing will ever change", best example being a recent discussion I had with another person on 1984(George Orwell's, not the year) she claimed it was "ridiculously stupid" when I asked why her answer was this "because people today challenge their leaders, why would that mindset change?". | |
We will be lucky if we last 15 years | |
Dude, what the historians are saying is that much of the information we record today will be inaccessible not because the tech of the future will be steps ahead of us, but because it's being preserved in a digital format. The fact is, when modern civilizations began to look back and rediscover ancient civilizations they were still working with the same methods: Pen & Paper, Chisel & Stone, whatever, the point was: this information physically existed. You could pick up the parchment Caesar had written on. You had to go a destroy it with fire or tear it up, not just point and click to get rid of it. We can talk about data reclamation, but let's be frank, at some point it will be equivalent to teaching someone well-versed in calculators to use an abacus or a slide-rule (less actually, because future generations will have to go into it not even knowing what the hell a slide-rule is). Hell, MS-DOS is out of some people's comprehension and we're only up to Windows 7 for Pete's sake. Historians talk a lot about how much of recorded information has come down to us purely because books exist and it takes sincere effort to get rid of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. Just lying around in jars for us to find. So yah, when we switch to a completely digital society, lots of this stuff may not be saved. Think about movies. How many old movies are really surviving the transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray? I'm sure that many old movies are being lost, and will die when the last VHS player is destroyed. I know there are LPs that you can't get in a digital format. So when new stuff is being created in a totally digital format that will soon become obsolete, you have to wonder: Will this be around in 500 years? 100? 50? 20? It doesn't look good. | |
Actually, all of these things -do- have preservation societies dedicated to them...movies for example have the National Film Registry. I think the gist of the article, is that for other things such as photos, diaries and other personal artifacts -aren't- being backed up by the people who own them. That is, nowadays a lot of people have a blog rather than a diary, digital photos rather that printed copies. However, not many people take the time to make hard copies of these or back them up. However...I don't agree that it's the 'digital age' that is causing this, but rather that not enough people are taking the initiative to preserve these things. | |
If anything the digitization of information has made it easier to collect and archive data. Yes, old technology will become obsolete, but not before people make converters to help information jump the gap in the technology. The only things that won't be carried over as technology evolves are the things people either forgot about long ago or never cared about in the first place.
Actually it does look good. many old movies are being brought over to DVD, Analog-Digital converters exist and are easy to find, and there are digital turntables available that will record Vinyl albums to your computer. The thing about technology is that for it to stick it needs to be backwards compatible. Every time a new media format comes out, people take the old media and convert it. for the media that isn't converted by companies, people make converters. If people care enough to want it to exist further, it will. Written works are transcribed to hard drives around the world, Audio is re-recorded, and Video is converted, and often improved in the process. Technology isn't killing history, it's saving it. What could easily have been destroyed by a flood, rain, fire, wind, exposure, etc., is now preserved over the internet, existing simultaneously on millions of computers around the world, instead of a single copy in a glass case, Available to anyone who wants it, when they want it. | |
As mentioned, the difficulty would be in sorting through enourmous amounts useless info such as: "So, I've noticed the water sprinklers at the White House come on twice a week now." And pertinent info NOT related to gardening. | |
Well maybe its a good thing this era will be forgotten, in 100 years they will look back at us now and be baffled.... if we still exist... | |
I had a plan to take snapshots of 4chan, print out the whole site, with all comments and images, then store it in a time capsule set to open in 100 years time, to remind the inhabitants of the strange future why they destroyed the internet and returned to a pastoral society. | |
That or they will think that mental disease was rampant to a point where we were forced to herd some of them together in one place for entertainment purposes. Or as I like to call it: the truth. | |
All right! Let's save 21st century by printing out all the porn contained on the internet in neat little books and distribute it over the whole world! I personally think that the age of physically written language as the main medium might be coming to an end. In some hundred, or maybe even less, I'm no prophet, years, people might go on with their lives never touching actual "physical" books and only seeing them in museums. | |
That's a perfect idea! Seriously, do that. I'm adding this to my "Things to do before death" list. | |
It's true really, even out paper products, being bio degradable and all, likely won't last too long past our current culture. | |
We survived for millions of years without technology. We'll do fine without it again. I still have no idea how this could even happen. Couldn't they just make another one of those places that can hold 4 billion and something images so we don't need to worry about detritus? | |
In some ways, I side with the whole "So What" end of things. Truly, has all the computer technology we enjoy today eliminated paper texts, disc-form music (or music sheets for that matter), or canvased art? No. Novels will continue to be published, music will still release in a retail-salable format, and no amount of digital imagery will eliminate paintings. Most things digital begin as something physical, and when you consider that and the number of die-hards who refuse to modernize, we are still generations away from the point where nothing is done hardcopy or in the flesh. I do however agree that this could become a problem, but I don't agree with the arguments why. The way that the problem is being portrayed by the "It is a big deal" side mostly stems from the mistaken belief that all information is worth saving. Do you honestly think the world would be a poorer place 400 years from now if the old copies of an Uwe Bole film weren't archived properly? The best works survive and reprint in the new media form as time progresses, we will still have "The Lord of the Rings" and "Catcher in the Rye" to read in the future, and I'd bet my car that in 2125, you can still buy music by Elvis or the Beetles. So we may not have Alanis Morisette or Tay Zonday, well good riddance. | |
I've got this history degree thing and all i can think of is "meh" | |
What a lot of people in this thread are missing is that, up until very recently, you didn't need anything but good eyes and a decent light source to see data. You didn't need tape drives of a specific format, or floppy disc readers, or lasers; the mark 1 mod 0 eyeball and daylight were sufficient. I understand that people are already having trouble with this; amusingly, this became a plot point in the TV series Flashpoint in one episode, where the key clue to unlocking the reason behind a crazed gunman's standoff was contained in eyewitness testimony from twenty-five years before... recorded on a Betamax cassette. Time is counting down, the bomb's ticking, and cops are trying to find a Beta-compatible VCR before it's too late... However the idea is even older; in Fredrick Pohl's Heechee novels human prospectors discover the ruins of an alien settlement in an asteroid, and they don't even recognise that the aliens left behind entire libraries because the "books" aren't shaped like anything a human would use and have no markings visible to the naked eye. (The books end up being sold as cheap souveniers to tourists because they're shiny and pretty.) Printed material, on the other hand, is incredibly durable. Recently scientists discovered a lost mathematical treatise by Archimedes, written 2200 years ago, despite the de-inking and re-use of the paper to make a prayer book fifteen-hundred years later. (Admittedly, this time they used some super-cool tech... but not to guess the format, only to clarify what could be seen by the naked eye.) Fifteen-hundred years from now, what are future historians (or, if we're unlucky, archeologists) going to make of Blu-Ray? Will they have the specifications to even be able to read one, or recognise it as anything but a pretty-shiny bangle probably used for decoration? As someone who took some archeology and a lot of history, it does concern me a bit. -- Steve | |
so they're worried that by collecting information that they'll get a lot of junk? so their answer is to stop collecting information? do their information collecting devices only have one setting? isn't that why you have techs go through it with you, to eliminate all that garbage? | |
Not entirely true. For decades now, libraries have archived data on microfilm, which in turn required machines to read. | |
I suppose... but if you absolutely must you can use a machine as simple as a magnifying glass to read microfilm. (A microscope or projector would be better, though.) It still recognisably contains data, and doesn't require a particular codec to extract it... an obstacle I found a decade ago while trying to recover data from my old, fried MFM hard drive. -- Steve | |
I don't care about pictures. I don't care what I looked like at the time, no one else cares either. Why should I save a bunch of inane snapshots? | |
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Historians Fear 21st Century Will Be 'Black Hole'
The British Library has expressed concerns that the way we use technology will leave future generations in the dark.
Our conversion to a digital society is worrying many librarians, as images, information and correspondence that would have endured through the ages in previous generations instead sits as a clutch of binary code on a hard drive, unseen and usually unpreserved.
Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library said, "Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft; I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It's tragic."
As technology improves and older devices become obsolete, the information stored within runs the risk of becoming lost. The BBC's Doomsday Project of 1986, intended as a record of the state of the nation, was recorded on 12" video disks for example and only survives today thanks to a specialist team rescuing it in 2000.
The British Library has plans to compile an archive of 'notoriously ephemeral' material from UK websites, a monumental task to say the least, and have worked with Microsoft to unlock millions of files created using now defunct operating systems. They've also managed to get government agencies to cooperate by storing e-mails at the National Archives at Kew.
Some historians however, are worried that in our efforts to preserve the important information, we're in danger of being saddled with a lot of digital detritus. Tristan Hunt, of Queen Mary College in London said, "It's essential that mainstream institutions such as the National Gallery or the White House or the Ministry of Defence keep email correspondence... On the other hand, we're producing much more information these days than we used to, and not all of it is necessary. Do we want to keep the Twitter account of Stephen Fry or some of the marginalia around the edges of the Sydney Olympics? I don't think we necessarily do."
Source: The Guardian
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