The coming dark ages...at least for personal archives...

It has been a bad few days for personal archives/ists. Nikon has announced that they will no longer be selling 35mm camera bodies (though they will still produce a professional model). This makes good business sense, sadly, as everyone (me included) continues to shift to digital cameras.

However, also recently announced is a new study showing that "burned" (as opposed to originally pressed) digital media has a 2 to 5 year life span (here, here). How many of us are backing up to magnetic tape?

The implications of this are really quite bad...imagine going back to look at the wedding/baby/family images you have so diligently been burning on CDs, only to find that the dye used in discs has so degraded that the data is lost. Forever.

And it is not just images. I archive my email and papers (all the way back to college (I still have most of the papers I wrote on an AppleII and its successor, a Mac+). I have them, still, because I archived them onto external drives (and have moved them periodically to larger, newer drives). Will I ever read/browse them again…who knows. But maybe my son will. Or his child. I *loved* finding my parents old papers (school, love letters, etc.). We are, sadly, creating a generation (or more) where all these tangible bits of our individual and collective “pasts” are being lost as bits and bytes fail.

It raises interesting questions…will our private/cultural histories be told by our lower classes, for their “histories” will remain while those of the wealthy(ier) will be lost in the ether. Should be all, to avoid the preceding, be actively supporting remote storage options like .mac (though if you stop paying, the data is, again, gone). Should we be thinking about our cultural/data histories as a valuable societal asset, such that there should be state supported public data storage archives (with all the privacy issues such an effort would entail). Maybe it is just cultural history Darwinism, those that are the most forward thinking, lucky or the like will be the ones who leave their mark for future generations…the rest of us will just be garbled bits of data, strutting and fretting across countless discs, signifying nothing