In the digital dark ages

No sooner had I written about my mistrust of cloud storage and fear of formats becoming obsolete, and the attendant loss of much cherished albums and photos, than Pitchfork published a far more eloquent meditation on the subject by Damon Krukowski.

The former Galaxie 500 man's piece was also prompted by the erasure (accidental or deliberate?) of years of user files uploaded to MySpace, an incident that he suggests was most significant because it revealed "a collective loss of interest in the type of history we associate with archives - a reconstruction of a specific moment in the past". We may be living in what others have termed a "digital dark age": "a period of history that will be largely blank due to lost information - like a giant broken link when the future tries to look back at our time".

There is, he argues, a fundamental problem with digital archives - they are "always in flux, and always tending toward inaccessibility, and ultimately invisibility. Perhaps they want to disappear." In other words, you can't go wrong with a book or a record - something you can handle, put on a shelf and keep for posterity.