Through A Glass, Darkly - Actions to Avert the Coming Digital Dark Ages*

Much of our global cultural heritage, and our own individual and

social imprint, is at serious risk of disappearing. More and more of our

lives is bound to the ones and zeroes of bits residing on a cloud server

or a mobile device. Those bits in turn are mediated by the software and

hardware implements we utilize every day. The bitstreams are

unintelligible, however, without suitable data formats, computer

applications, operating systems, and hardware environments to

interpret them for us. As those systems are modified or replaced over

time, we inevitably lose our ability to access the content. The resulting

technological obsolescence can leave us trapped in a “digital dark

age” as a culture that has lost its collective memory. As our reliance

on data grows even more pervasive in every sector, massive technology

and market trends—such as born-digital content, cloud computing,

“big data,” and the Internet of Things—will only accelerate the scale

and scope of the problem.

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