I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.
It’s possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the Domesday Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and hated – come into view.
But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That’s because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world’s information as it’s produced these days.
It’s not just what gets lost. It’s how things get changed. We have already seen media outlets and others go back years to change the wording or content of old writings. Unless someone printed it out, there is no contemporary record to challenge it.
People who are writing wonderful things with great insight; technical documents that explain how things work; court records; etc… if they are exclusively in a digital format, they are subject to be lost or altered in an instant.
That’s not to say that physical writings can’t be lost too. They can, and have been, for millennia. But while they can be lost, it is not easy to change them.
All that to say, buy books. Print out your important stuff. The digital world is fragile.
Thing of the past: family photo album.
Now it’s the Family Thumb Drive. If you can find it.
I have my grandparents’ photo albums, sitting on the book shelf, and still find it a blast to grab them and look back to the realities of the 1930s, ‘40s, 50s, seeing my mom and dad as kids, then teens, then their wedding. even if just in black&white.
We have are own, too, with my soon-to-be-40yr old daughter in bunny Jammies, or walking in on her first day of school.
Sad that a physical photograph hasn’t been added to that album in probably twenty-plus years.
MJM that’s on you. Printing out digital photos is easy and not super expensive. It does take a bit of time and effort though.
We have a digital picture frame that rotates through family photos. It is nice.