Who has not started a spring clean and become sidetracked, having discovered an old photo album? Which of us doesn’t love perusing early Facebook pics?
The man with the best job title in the world, chief internet evangelist and vice-president at Google, Vint Cerf, has warned of a possible “digital dark age” as technology becomes outmoded. Cerf, who basically invented the means for the internet, has warned that as tech evolves, it may become more difficult to access older digital methods of storage. Think about that un-openable document with an obscure file extension, a remnant of an old PC running Windows 95.
Or, if you ever wanted to go back and reread your undergrad dissertation? Good luck finding a computer with a floppy disk drive. This issue of digital obsolescence is not a new concern. Cornell University has even started to keep a list of the tech that is already six feet under.
Cerf’s main point is that future historians will have fewer resources as redundant tech become inaccessible. It is true that, should a mass of digital material be lost to an unplugged ether, our collective memory of the early 21st century — and the understanding for those who come after us — could be obscured. If, in a future age of microchip-implanted computers under the skin, Android and Apple phones became landfill, and tweets and Instagram pics unrecoverable, then how would 3015’s Mary Beard ever know about selfies and throwback Thursday?
But for individuals, might this be a good thing? Perhaps not being able to have at our fingertips a bundle of digital memories is a psychological positive; a boon for mental health. I come from a family of hoarders. On my iPhone, I currently have 5,426 photos in my camera roll. I own two portable 1 terabyte hard drives, stacked with multimedia files and documents.
Further back, in an offline tumbling cupboard of mementoes, I have shoe boxes full of birthday cards, love letters, plane tickets, postcards, club flyers and tacky gifts from various countries. Related: Mental disorders should not be hastily defined Mary O’Hara I still have report cards from school. Worse, I still have GCSE textbooks and past papers — just in case I need to look something up. Like the scientific formula for water, perhaps?
I once almost wept when I realised a poster had faded and yellowed in the sunlight. I’ve also accidentally deleted a thread of text messages with a contact, and rued the loss of messages I probably would never have looked at again. But how much of this is healthy? Is hanging on to emotional artefacts conducive to good mental health? Why do we keep this stuff? Doesn’t it just pull us into the past? Why go back into a vortex of pain reading over an ex’s words, or sob over a school yearbook and all those dashed hopes?
There have been psychological studies that show habitual hoarders have a higher level of activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex when deliberating over whether to chuck that old C86 out. What does this mean? That the person’s actual sense of self is somehow correlated to a material item.
The irony of digital obsolescence, of course, is that digital technology was supposed to make personal effects and memories less ephemeral and more secure. Vinyl gets scratched; cassette tape unspools; tea gets spilt on paper.
With social media and cloud storage, we are only too aware that this stuff isn’t going anywhere. (And especially if it is in the hands of a government intelligence agency.) But if Cerf is right, that now might not be the case.
Perhaps he is correct about the academic loss for future anthropologists, or the dulling of the collective memory of things like MS-DOS. But for those in the here and now, it is probably best to just let it all go.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Hannah Jane Parkinson is a writer on pop culture, music, tech, football, politics and mental health.