Dr. Vinton "Vint" Cerf, vice president of Google, warned that technology could cause mankind to be lost to history. As people store information in a more digital fashion, those that are stored using older technology are getting harder to access.
This would mean that historians of the future have no way to learn about the lives of humans today. Cerf compared the situation with the period of the dark ages. At this time, there is little information known about the Romans because of the scarcity of written records.
"In our zeal to get excited about digitizing, we digitize photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," said Cerf. "I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about, create a physical instance of them. Print them out."
People are then encouraged to print out their treasured photos instead of merely storing them as memory files.
"We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it," added Cerf. A huge pile of digitized materials that come from tweets, blogs, pictures, videos and even court rulings and emails may all be lost forever. This is because the programs that are required to enable their viewing will become defunct. These electronic data will not run on the computers of future historians.
Cerf's warning highlights the negative side of modern technology. People have the misconception that digitizing music, photos, letters and other files would assure them that the files would survive for a long period. However, the programs and the corresponding hardware needed to access the files continue to fall out of use. This will most likely continue even though researchers are showing progress in digital file storage.
Compared to the civilizations from the ancient times, they didn't have such problems. Historians had simply depended on stories that were written on baked clay tablets in cuneiform or on rolled papyrus scrolls. Future scholars, in contrast, would depend on PDFs, word files and other digitized data when they need to study today's culture.
"We'll just be unknowns," said Cerf. "Forgotten, because our technology was not good enough to remember. They will know the Egyptians, with the papyrus documents and stone tablets, better than they'll know us."
Apart from convincing users to make tangible copies of important documents, another way to solve the problem is by using the so-called "digital vellum," which is still in a development stage. The concept involves taking a snapshot of all the methods involved in opening a digital file and storing the information together with the document itself. Doing so would allow scientists to use the information in reproducing the files simply by following the instructions.
