Our Perishable forms of Expression.

A Thousand years from now what will have survived to tell the future generations of our hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates, and desires?

What are the chances that our fragile digital lives will still be machine readable, even a hundred years from now?

Great works of art and literature from our own history survive now because they were preserved by the wise in houses of learning. They remain available to us because they rely upon nothing aside from their own physical form to be viewable.

Even in our own life time we can see the loss associated with our fragile media and fleeting technology. For example, early seminal works in cinematography have been lost to time because the medium they were recorded upon could not stand the test of time, and the elements.

There is now the trend of transferring forward works from the past into current media. But how many times are we expected to re purchase that one item? What are we buying, the media or the medium? A shift in perception is needed to allow easier, less costly future proofing of our collections. Are we buying the artists works, or are we merely renting them till the medium are no longer viable?

We need to seriously consider the impact of our increasing reliance on pure digital forms of expression. Without the underlying physical form, what can we do to carry forward our digital lives? Even a modern compact disk has a limited lifetime before the disk fails from environmental decay. Even if the physical disk survives will future machines be expected to be compatible? Or will we be required to actively future proof our digital compendium of our lives? At each shift in storage media we will require transference of vast quantities of bits.

It seems obvious that there will be no passive preservation of digital data, active nurturing of our archives will be required to preserve them for the edification of future generations. Want your grand children to see that beautiful digital photo of their parents as a child? Well your going to have to plan for it and work for it, it’s not an easy road you embark upon. Good luck to us all.

Yours truly,

Jonathan Milley

Engineer, Software Developer, Digital Photographer, Website designer, and worried denizen of our digital age.