The internet era could turn out to be a black hole of information unless people start to keep their records and photographs in a more secure form … on paper.
Google executive Dr Vinton Cerf, who is known as one of the Fathers of the Internet for co-designing the TCP/IP protocols, said future generations will look back at us and wonder what were we doing? By keeping our records only in digital form most of them are likely to be inaccessible by contemporary computers in the future.
Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Silicon Valley, Cerf, warned that we could be initiating a new dark age where no records will remain. As operating systems and software get upgraded, documents and images stored using older technology are becoming increasingly inaccessible.
"If we’re thinking one thousand or three thousand years ahead, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.
“The 22nd century and future centuries after that will wonder about us but they’ll have great difficulty knowing much because so much of what we’ve left behind may be bits that are uninterpretable.
“In our zeal to get excited about digitising, we digitise photographs thinking it’s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong. I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about, create a physical instance of them. Print them out.”
He spoke of a book, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, based on letters written by and to the President of the USA over a hundred year ago. She found the letters and copies of them in various public libraries.
“Let us imagine that there’s a 22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin and she decides to write about the beginning of the 21st century and seeks to reproduce the conversations of the time. She discovers that there’s an awful lot of digital content that either has evaporated because nobody saved it, or it’s around but it’s not interpretable because it was created by software that’s 100 years old.”
And it's not just letters and photos. Legal documents may not be accessible in times ahead unless they are future-proofed. One possible solution he suggested is digital vellum, a technology being developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
A digital snapshot is taken when an item is stored of all the processes needed to reproduce it at a later date, including the software and operating system. The so-called digital vellum could then be used to reproduce the picture file or spread sheet, on a contemporary computer centuries from now.