One of the head honchoes at internet giant Google has called on the public to use print, saying if it doesn’t there may be no record of the 21st century in succeeding generations.
Dr Vinton Cerf vice president of Google says the decline in print, being caused by the rise in digital technology, where photographs are shared via social media, and emails have taken over letters, is not something to be celebrated.
Cerf says, “In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it is going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong.”
“An awful lot of digital content either has evaporated because nobody saved it, or it is around but it is not interpretable because it was created by software that is old,” he says.
“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.
“If we are thinking 1000 years, 3000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?”
Cerf, also known as the chief internet evangelist at Google, says the future generations might refer to this century as the ‘dark ages’ because written forms of documenting momentous events have almost ceased.
Cerf recommends people make physical copies of important documents, so they will not be lost into the future.
“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 have left behind may be bits that are uninterpretable.”
He says to help future historians understand our way of life computer scientists at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg are exploring a new concept called ‘digital vellum’.
The process of digital vellum involves capturing a snapshot of all the ways a digital file can be opened, which is then stored alongside the document itself. This will help scientists in the future to reproduce the files by following the instructions.
