One of the topics I like to bring up in the discussion of preserving digital data is the idea of a Digital Dark Age… the notion of a period in our historic knowledge that ends up getting lost due to a failure to plan and preserve our early digital content.
The New Scientist, however, recently published an article (Feb 2, 2010) on something a bit more cataclismic: the concept of Digital Doomsday. From the article:
Suppose, for instance, that the global financial system collapses, or a new virus kills most of the world’s population, or a solar storm destroys the power grid in North America. Or suppose there is a slow decline as soaring energy costs and worsening environmental disasters take their toll. The increasing complexity and interdependency of society is making civilisation ever morevulnerable to such events (New Scientist, 5 April 2008, p 28 and p 32).
Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity’s knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?
The article is a compelling read, and offers an intellectual exercise on how much of our “stuff” will survive such a castastrophe. Ironically, the logic is that the digital content with the most copies oin existence may win out. So, while scholarly works, theses, research and other important scientific data would be at risk, pop music may surive just fine.
