SAFEKEEPING

The first part of this post is in the nature of a Guest Post by my husband, aka "anyjazz", after which I've added a few lines myself.

By "anyjazz"
Prompted by the post:
The Good and Not So Old Days,
from Thursday, May 28, 2015 -

At the risk of sounding like a rabid conspiracy theorist, here are some thoughts on the digital era.

Unless one of our current minimum-wage PhDs invents a completely tamper-proof, loss proof digital system, humanity is doomed to lose a substantial segment of subtleties in its history. The big facts will remain in memory but the detail found in photographic documentation will be gone. Forever.

A few years ago my daughter boasted videos and photographs of a great grandson’s beginnings. She documented his first steps, words and other childhood events. All on her phone. The data could not be transferred to anything, another phone, a computer, a “cloud” or a disk. The history is lost.

How do we examine some history of say, the 1920’s? We read about it and look at the plethora of pictures and cinema from that era, printed and reprinted in books. We can look at that old, black-page photograph album from the closet shelf that great grandma put together with US in mind! That decade was nearly a hundred years ago. What will be left of the current era a hundred years from now?

Will there be “clouds” of photographs and text available conveniently for perusal and education? Or are we doomed to become more and more uninformed about the reality we live in?

Twilight is right. One big bang and it’s all gone. Or perhaps “not available” to an inquiring mind. History might be reduced to oral stories from memory, passed down in limited quantities to new memories; New memories that do not have the depth and color of their predecessors, nor their passion.

What was the government’s big problem with the Vietnam disaster? It was on television, step by step, mistake by mistake. People saw it. People didn’t want any more of it. The lucrative war machine ground to a halt for a while. That’s not going to happen again. No more satellite transmissions of digital television from on the scene.

If George Orwell had known of this digital development, he would have said “Aha! See! I told you so.” Keep the public uninformed of current events. Keep historical events dim so that they can be re-written at any time. You can’t say things are better or worse today than they were yesterday, because you don’t accurately remember yesterday. The corporate governments won’t want you making those comparisons anyway.

And after all, deleting data files is much safer and tidier than burning books.

Even without dire calamity removing the internet from our lives, there are still problems associated with our digital way of life. An interesting article explains:

Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk...Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf.

Snip:

The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitised in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

It's good to have precious photographs and documents available in both paper and digital form - "proper" photos and papers can be lost for ever too - as I know very well due to having lost all of my own to fire in 1996. Fortunately my mother's collection provided some replacements, but the majority remain lost forever.

 At Shutterfly

One method of saving photographs the "paper-way", while still taking advantage of our digital world, is to make up a "photo book" with the help of one of the several companies offering this service: Walgreens, Shutterfly etc. Here's a comparison and review of the ten currently offering this service. We haven't yet used this service, but intend to do so.