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The Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up
Rall, Ted
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/22/the-digital-dark-ages-movies-and-books-get-deleted-as-selfies-pile-up/Date Written: 2015-12-22 Publisher: Counterpunch Year Published: 2015 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX18564 Historians and archivists call our times the "digital dark ages." The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don't blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we've seen big 8" floppies replaced by 5.25" medium replaced by little 3.5" floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud -- and let's not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc. Subject Headings |