- Richard Whitt
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.