Welcome to the 2nd Dark Age

My wife and I are off next week to spend a week in Luxor. (That's Egypt for the geographically challenged!)

And I have been thinking about the incredible amount we know about a civilisation that was building huge and complex architecture when the average Brit was living in a mud hut.

And I thought... What will future generations make of our society?

And my answer is: Pretty much nothing! We are currently living through what future generations will call a dark age.

The dark ages of our history were not as commonly held an age where nothing of note actually happened. They were dark because very little of what happened actually survives today in written record.

Ah, but, I hear you say, we record everything we have all kinds of recorded media.

Yes, we do. But in our case we just don't plan for longevity. Who now has the ability to read 8" floppy disks? Who can get data back from big Winchester drives? Does anyone really think that CD drives and DVD drives will be anywhere, other than as exhibits in the science museum in a few short decades? (This of course assumes that the disks are still readable and the dyes commonly used in recordable optical media today haven't all just faded to nothing)

As a musician, I was doing multi-track projects back in the 80s. I used to use Steinberg Pro24 using an Atari ST computer. Project files that I created on my Atari, are recorded on 3.5" floppies which were formatted in a slightly different way to the way DOS formats and I have absolutely no way of getting those projects back. That data is almost lost already.

And we've all read, I'm sure of of the 24 track projects from the 70s that are all but unplayable; when the 25th anniversary remaster projects of a number of famous bands and artists went and got the 2" tapes from the vault the tapes had degraded almost to the point of ruin. Another few short years and they would have been truly lost!

Most of our literature is printed on paper that contains so much acid it will eat itself to dust in less than a generation. I have books from the late 70s that are yellowed and fragile, and yet my wife recently got an 1820s pocket edition of Byron that was still in beautiful condition.

Now that everyone takes photos in digital format, and the vast majority only store them on their home PC, and never print them (and never back up their PC data!) all those boxes of photos stored in people's attics, and are routinely discovered and used to document the social history of the 20th century just don't exist.

Because we only think in the now, our children most likely just won't know what granny looked like when she was young.

No more collections of records from the early 21st century will be waiting to be found. They were all encoded as MP3s and were lost along with the digital photos that were on the PC nobody backed up.

What about letters and diaries? Much of our knowledge of days gone by comes not from the great events of history, but from the letter sent home from the front, or the letter sent to a loved one or an entry in a diary. Lets face it, who hasn't heard of Samuel Pepys? Much our knowledge of court intrigue of Elizabethan England comes actually from letters.

And nobody writes a letter any more. It's all email. And, lets be honest... Who keeps email? Even this blog - which I guess is a modern day diary will be subject to the transient nature of it's storage medium.

I know that archivists think about this seriously and are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort copying stuff to the NEXT format. That is fine. However the task is growing almost exponentially and it does not include the kind of personal data that we rely on in historical research today.

And it does all rely on a continuity of history. Any major social upheaval, (you know war, disaster, etc) that stops the archivists working, will mean that , due to the really transient nature of pretty much all the media we use today, almost everything we know will be gone in a few short years.

The late 20th Century? The early 21st? No mate. Nothing happened then.