Historians in the future will hate us for our digital technology. Unlike writing on paper, magnetic blips fade away quickly.
Yet I think we're being very wise. We really wouldn't want to carve in stone all the filth in the Internet. It's a good thing that future generations won't witness our decadence.
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It sounds like a science fiction book your post,
However, I would think that for that still is a way to go.
Meaning most of the important documents are all print out, (as it is my understanding) still we are not ONLY dependable on bits, even if we are close to it.
And for sure not the major number of countries in this planet and less of individuals are really depending only in digital technology, even if we are pushing to do so.
And as in the past, we will lose as much information as when it was transmitted orally. The only difference now a days we have TONS!!! more of info, because also we are tons more of humans and tons more that have access to produce information, and we know about more gossips of everybody-culture, than before. In few words, we have to be beyond more critic on all these.
Now, being myself dramatic and really "into science fiction": when time comes, and our civilization disappears or we make it disappears, and a new form of life shows up (if it does). They will have, probably, as we do have our archeologist. And the chances that they do the same as our archeologist is high. Which means they will give their own interpretation to our "high - tech" devices. Maybe, they will think there were offerings to the gods, interesting things to play or tools for harvesting....Who knows!!! and actually that part will be quiet interesting to see! And they will only "read" the frescos and the commemorative plates of statues, which will survive!.
Although the most important documents are on paper, the most important documents represent only one very narrow view of our society. The historians in the future would come across thousands of references to this thing "Internet" that they know cannot be recovered anymore (most of magnetic and optical storage media don't last long).
The historians in the future will curse us for not keeping any better lasting records of our time, but I say it's a bliss. Unlike the Pyramids, which were buried in the sands of time, our degeneracy will be forgotten forever.
I believe (at least hope) that in a few years the importance of magnetic and optical, media as used by consumers, is going to drop. In a few years we won't do backups to blacnk media at home and at work. What we will do, is back up our data to newtork connected data servers.
Those servers of course use the same magnetic or other media as consumers would, but there's an important difference. The professional management of those kinds of data warehouses is so much beyond what consumers do. The data is replicated, the hardware is redundant, the hardware is upgraded and so on.
As a result the data is continuously on multiple media and always being transferred to new hardware and media.
That's my two cents. And that's what I hope as I donw wan't to do any backups of my 7 gigs of photos. (Or the much higher amounts of other... stuff...)
Pastorik, I am afraid that by the year 4000 your photos are gone, along with all other electronically-stored stuff of today. What will remain of our civilization is the stuff we've produced or built: our physical artefacts.
But there are old books that have been saved. Through wars and what not. Why not a hard drive or two? And when one hard drive can store many books, isn't it evitable that historians will have more material on us than we've had on previous generations?
Data on hard drives (magnetic charges) fades much much faster than ink on paper. Spontaneous degradation of magnetic media begins right after the recording, and unless the magnetic blips are actively maintained, data becomes inaccessible quite quickly. It has been estimated that errors due to degradation of magnetic storage media are inevitable already within 5-15 years from the recording date.
Selling whole content of Internet, on 25 480 000 DVDs, eventually without porn on 2 DVDs.
Damn, I seem to be wrong!
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/16007733.html
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