‘Digital dark age’ will leave little clue on how we lived

Mr Cerf, the vice-president of Google and one of the internet’s founding fathers, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that the issue was not that traces of digital items would disappear, but that their meaning will be lost as old interfaces became redundant.

Examples would include old digital photographs once stored on CD-ROMs or held on the social media service Friendster, which in the west has largely been replaced by Facebook, or conversations between the earliest Compuserve computer services. See these ads below:

With technology developing so fast, the result could mean that future historians are unable to learn about our lives, Dr Cerf said. He compared the potential loss to the dark ages – the time after the Romans, about which little is known because there are few written records.

“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,” he told the AAAS meeting in the Silicon Valley capital, San Jose, California.

“I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out.”

Significance

But even that might not work, Dr Cerf said, since historians are not often aware about the significance of important documents until years after those that made them have died. “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.”

Future centuries… will wonder about us, but they’ll have great difficulty knowing much because so much of what we’ve left behind may be uninterpretable bits. Vint Cerf

Future historians will see the early 21st century as “an information black hole” unless some sort of “digital vellum” is introduced to preserve the content of the internet for millennia to come, he said.

This would involve taking a “snapshot” at the time an item is stored including all the elements required to reproduce it at a later date, including the software and operating system.

The snapshot could then be used to reproduce the game, picture file or spreadsheet, on a “modern” computer – rather like an old “emulator” system used to do in the computers of yesteryear.

“Some people make the argument that the important stuff will be copied and put into new media and so why should we worry,” said Dr Cerf.

“But… historians will tell you that sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years. So failure to preserve them will cause us to lose our perspective.”