My Dad being being somewhat of an amateur social commentator, has many theories on the future of mankind. One of his more well developed musings, centres around the fragility of digital media and the risk of mankind losing an entire tome of information that will never be recovered. The problem is we have staked our belief in digital storage to such an extent that we have forsaken hard tangible copies of our most important records. The digital camera revolution means all those personal memories are now stored on memory cards, hard drives and servers around the world, instead of in dusty shoeboxes under the bed. Surely safer now? Well my Dad for one isn’t convinced.
In Mum and Dad’s drawer at home is a Cine 8 Film of their wedding day in 1968. The last time it was viewed was probably 1969 when Cine 8 projectors were present in probably 0.05% of people’s home rather than confined to Visual Arts museums as they would be today. He could have course converted it to video, but then we had a choice of Betamax, then VHS. Fifteen years later it would then have to be converted again to DVD and would sometime around now be a candidate for conversion to Mpeg, Quicktime or even Blu-ray. Such organised multiple format conversion antics, need an Olympic athlete level of discipline to undertake and it does seem rather OTT given that photos, well wisher’s cards, and other ephemera have survived intact without so much as a casual encounter with a jpeg, SD card or 500Gb SATA drive.
My Dad’s theory goes that all important records of our age will be lost through a combination of failure to convert to the format of the day, media and hardware failure. Imagine the generations 500 years hence, theorising on what life was like at the turn of the millenium, and how they actually had more information about life during the Stone Age. Judging by the quality of anything we build these days, there certainly won’t be any buildings or other man made objects to give them much of a clue.
Then there are all those that are throwing out their LPs and CDs in favour of 192Kbps encoded MP3s. Not only is the tangible ownership of a record gone, a big chunk of the sound quality has too, although no one seems to care or notice. The smart money is on the collectors who are busy squirrelling away those first pressings of Beatles Classics, or in my more esoteric case, an original 1974 issue of Stormbringer by Deep Purple. That’s if the damp and mice in the loft haven’t destroyed it first, which is of course the other side of the argument.
Consideration for how long your collectables will last is very important and it worries me deeply that watch collectors are pouring thousands into large collections of early LED and electric transition watches only to find the coils rot away and transistors go open circuit, rendering them beyond repair and worthless. I recently found a cracking Seamaster F300 for no money at all and was delighted when it purred into life after fitting a fresh battery. Only 3 months later it is now as dead as Monty Python’s proverbial parrot for no apparent reason, with an imminent recovery as likely as Gordon Brown’s green shoots. An early Bulova Quartz complete with it’s original box also died alone in the dark, in my safe last year, in very similar circumstances.
I’m not so keen on buying too many more watches like this and will stick to investing in technology thats proved to last a 100 years or so. Whether I religiously start printing out my digital photos and storing them under the bed in that shoebox is another matter.
I somehow doubt future mankind will learn much.