Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time

“Culture, any culture… depends on the quality of its record of knowledge.” — Don Waters, “‘Preserving Digital Information”

Our culture and society has been enriched by the creation and proliferation of the Internet. Information has become increasingly more accessible and has enabled so many of us to become active creators rather than passive consumers of content. With that, we’re experiencing an explosive growth of digital data, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and that data needs a place to live.

Not only does our data need a place to live, but it needs a place to survive into the future. What happens if years from now, we are no longer able to access our photos, documents, music — essentially all the records of our lives? We will not only be forgotten, but we’ll be thrusting the future into a “digital dark age,” as Vint Cerf calls it.

In short: “More and more of our lives are bound to the ones and zeroes of bits residing on a cloud server, or mobile device. Those bits in turn are mediated by the software and hardware implements we use every day. The bitstreams are unintelligible, however, without Continue reading