Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

What you see above is the scanned-in image of a postcard mailed by my grandparents to one of my grandmother’s sisters while they were traveling in 1957 (interesting to note the lack of a house address or zip code).  I scanned it in because it’s one of the few samples I have of my grandmother’s “voice” and handwriting and I wanted my kids to be able to see it.  Scanning it was a great way to both preserve it, back it up, and not have to worry about storing the physical postcard.

In the same vein - over the past few years when my parents (Hi Mom!) send us emails I’ll sometimes copy and past them into a closed blog post so that we preserve a bit of their writings.  I’ll also blog bits and pieces of interesting conversations - stories from when they were growing up etc. 

My folks have a large library of slides - both from photos they took and from my grandparents, inherited when my grandparents passed away.  And they haven’t stopped taking pictures - they’ve had a digital camera for a few years now and have been busy recording their various travels and four-wheeling adventures.

Here at home we recently paid to have roughly 4 years of film pictures digitized - adding to almost 8 years of digital family photos.  I’ve also transferred 8mm video to DVD, and have started copying the DVD files onto our backup drive.  In addition to photos and video there are weblog posts going back to 2003 here on Boyink.com.

At some point in this process it struck me how much more digital content is being stored from each generation.  A few MB from my grandparents, hundreds of MB from my parents, and I just bought a 1TB drive to be able to store and backup both our current “digital heritage” and what we expect to add to it on our upcoming year on the road.  If you plotted these points out on a chart the curve would be exponential.

It brings up a number of interesting questions and issues:

• If cheap photography means we take more photos, does the value of each photo diminish?
• Will “green” thinkers start to worry that we’re storing too much information, much of it duplicated (how many photos of Big Red does the world need)?
• What happens when the storage technology changes and people neglect to convert? Old prints could be forgotten in a basement for 30 years and still be viewable - will your digital files last that long? Have we traded longevity for the low cost and instant feedback of digital photography?
• Will future generations even be interested in still photography from the past - assuming virtual 3D type experiences will exist?

But there’s another issue that’s been on my mind lately - and that’s how these digital collections will start to become an inheritance.  As digital photographers age and begin to pass away, their work will likely pass down to their children or other still-alive family members—much like how I came to own the postcard from my grandparents.  But as each generation is storing more, that digital heritage will become larger each time it’s passed down.  It will also likely to contain a large number of different file types, files compressed with different algorithms, and other digital assets like domain names—all increasing the complexity and overhead of managing it.

It gets me wondering - will this digital heritage start to become a burden?  Will siblings argue over who has to become the “keeper of the files” - always tending to them to ensure old formats are being converted?  We are already information-overloaded in this age - will future generations have the time/attention to plow through what would be hundreds of terabytes of photos/video/blog archives/life-streaming?  Will businesses emerge to handle this strain?  Will people or families declare “digital heritage bankruptcy”—like some of us do now with email - and just start over? 

Or will the file format issue solve this for us by essentially putting an expiration date on content because it will be forgotten or neglected - essentially the future equivalent of having a collection of 5.25” floppy discs now with no way to access them?  As I write this it strikes me that this has already happened to me - I kept a journal for a while in college but it was written in a now-defunct word processor and stored on a long-lost 3.5” floppy drive (all things considered - it’s probably best that it’s gone).

Lots of questions and I certainly don’t propose to have the answers.  The only thing I can do in the meantime is try to be better at culling out and storing only the good or important digital content.  Right now the easy way out is to just save it all—the storage space is cheaper than the value of the time required to sort through it - but in the long run my laziness is going to become a burden for someone.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. salguod on February 20, 2010

   When my grandparents passed away, my Mom and Dad got all their stuff.  Physical stuff.  Antiques, furniture, keepsakes, boxes and boxes of slides, photos, letters, etc. 

   It came down to them to sort through it, separate the wheat from the chaff and determine what of the stuff not valuable to the family might be valuable to someone and get it to them.  Admittedly, my folks (Dad in particular) is more sensitive than others about this.  he can’t bear to think that that old trinket might not have gotten to a collector who wanted it and can’t, therefore, just throw it out.

   Anyway, the process has been exhausting for them and they’ve vowed to us that they plan on paring down their stuff so that we don’t have to go through that.  I think the same applied to us and our digital stuff, but like you say, it’s a bunch harder due to the sheer volume of data. 

   I’ve now got 6 years of blog posts and many MBs of digital pics.  All my kids now have digicams too. I think it’ll be good for us to try to stay on top of our data and to help our kids to do the same.  Still, new larger HDs are cheap and my time is scarce.

2. Jonathan Schofield on February 20, 2010

   Nice article. The same things have been bugging me though, like you, I don’t have any answers.

   One aspect you didn’t touch on is how all this data is tough to retrieve and work with at all in the future without the reliable and plentiful sources of energy that we take somewhat for granted right now.

   Assuming that is resolved, I foresee a new breed of archaeologist emerging in the future: part historian, part computer scientist/engineer.

3. Boyink (Author) on February 20, 2010

   Interesting thought on the Energy source.  My feeling has always been that we haven’t fully explored or innovated in non-fossil-fuel sources because fossil fuel remains cheap.

   If that cost were to become too much to bear I think the normal capitalist marketplace would respond with more solar/wind/wave/hydraulic sources to make up for it.

   I think you’re spot-on with the new breed of job though - there will be places/people/businesses who specialize in maintaining the means to determine, read and recover old file formats.

4. Jonathan Schofield on February 21, 2010

   Just had to work with a bunch of images that are over JPEG compressed. Wonder how much of our digital heritage is ‘lost’ to inexpert use of lossy compression?

5. carl schooff on February 21, 2010

   just today I’ve been busy moving files from old computer to new. The large sum of data is mostly itunes/personal media with a good chunk of work files. what a hassle. it seems that in these days any average joe is in need of reliable and redundant network storage in the home.  even that isn’t disaster proof. we are still in the stone age of the internet. mega-broadband plus cloud storage is really the only solution.

   any family with an HD video cam is going to easily amass terabytes of data in no time. it doesn’t make sense to have to manage this. All the hassles we go through with these clunky drives will hopefully be eliminated soon. When you pass, your family will just be given a username/password for the online family virtual/digital archive.

   The big question for me is: who are you going to trust with this information?

   Right now facebook is sort of doing this. There are actually fetuses with FB accounts. 20 years from now they will be able to trace a digital trail of every relationship/thought/bad haircut they ever had. terrifying.

   Also to the point of future proofing file formats. I heard an engineer once explain how this has been an insanely important issue for decades already. When you make plans for a bridge or skyscraper it is incredibly important that in 50-100 years there will be a way to ensure that those docs can still be read.

6. James on February 22, 2010

   We’ve been scanning my grand-parents photo albums, with photos dating back to 1901. It is all very nice to put these onto DVD, and private sites, and give copies to my family etc. Part of me wants to send out the scans to be printed up into books, for precisely the concerns that Jonathan brings up.

   Now over 10GB of scanned photos.

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