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Nothing is forever, especially digital!
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| Nothing is forever, especially digital! |
| 03.06.04 (10:31 am) [edit] |
[i]Could everyone agree that,
no one should be left alone?
Could you take my picture?
Cause I won't remember...
[b]Filter ~ Take a Picture[/b][/i]
Missy and Rikki are coming up today to go shopping and very shortly they'll be arriving, but I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts that have been running through my head lately.
Phil and Andrea came by Thursday night and we all went out to dinner, but not before Andrea wanted a picture of me to show this girl she's trying to set me up on that blind date with. Well, I told her I didn't have any recent pictures because everything I have lately is digital. I ended up having to print off the picture for her on some photo paper.
It was such an easily solved problem that I forgot about it immediately after, and yet there are dire implications in that little exchange. More and more people are purchasing digital cameras over their film counterparts. Entire family albums are now on CD.
As a historian this makes me shudder. The most lasting things we have of times gone by are the permanent artifacts. Photographs from the dawn of camera technology remain virtually unchanged besides normal fading and physical damage. We can preserve these articles and they will last hundreds of years.
On the other hand, digital forms change virtually overnight. Already graphical forms that emerged only 20 years ago are now obsolete. Few computers if any read the tape drives of only two decades ago. The way computer technology changes we could lose access to CDs within a very short time.
Sure, we could port the CD to DVD and the DVD to whatever comes after, but each new change brings the possibility of format change introducing defects to the original image including colour changes or physical abberations. If the JPEG and Bitmap formats of today give way to something else in the future any translation programs developed to handle that change could also alter the images in unforseen ways.
And what of an EMP or other phenomenon that disrupts computer systems? Digital materials are fragile and susceptible to any number of negative influences. Perhaps a nearby supernova could wash our planet in electromagnetic fluctuations that destroyed digital media worldwide. We'd be without years of history because nothing was stored hard copy.
Even more disturbing is the movement towards converting hard copy to digital. Yes, it makes the rare hard copies more accessible, but we MUST retain these hard copies so that if we lose their digital counterparts we will have the originals to return to.
Just a thought, but maybe if you are a digital photographer you might want to look into making hard copies of your photos so that you don't lose 5 years of memories to a virus, harddrive crash, or CD degradations...
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