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Google vice president Dr Vinton Cerf has warned that
old-tech historical archives could be lost forever (AFP/Getty Images)
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Digital technology could turn the 21st century into a
new dark age lost to history, a leading internet pioneer has warned. As operating systems and software get upgraded,
documents and images stored using older technology are becoming increasingly
inaccessible, said Dr Vinton "Vint" Cerf, vice president of Google.
In centuries to come, future historians looking back
on the current era could be confronted by a digital desert comparable with the
dark ages - the post-Roman period in Western Europe about which relatively
little is known because of the scarcity of written records.
Press Association reports Dr Cerf, who also has the title of chief internet
evangelist at Google, said: "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 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?
"We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data
into what could become an information black hole without realizing 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."
He urged people to think about printing out their
treasured photos and not rely on storing them as memory files.
"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," he said. "I would say if there are photos you are really
concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out."
Dr Cerf was speaking at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Silicon Valley
capital, San Jose, California.
To illustrate his point he referred to an
"amazing book" by American Pulitzer prize-winning historian Doris
Kearns Goodwin, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln.
Her material was obtained by scouring libraries for
copies of written correspondence between Lincoln and the people around him.
Dr Cerf said: "Let us imagine that there's a
22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin and she decides to write about the beginning
of the 21st century and seeks to reproduce the conversations of the time. She
discovers that there's an awful lot of digital content that either has
evaporated because nobody saved it, or its around but it's not interpretable
because it was created by software that's 100 years old."
The problem also had serious implications for the
storage of legal documents that needed to be kept for long periods of time, he
said.
"We're going to have to build into our thinking
the concept of preservation writ large," Dr Cerf added.
One possible solution was what he called "digital
vellum", a concept now being explored by computer scientists at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
This involved taking a digital "snapshot" at
the time an item is stored of all the processes needed 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 spread sheet, on a "modern" computer, perhaps
centuries from now.
"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."
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