Vint Cerf is known as one of the founding father's of the internet, and now a VP and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google. In a recent talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Cerf warned that human knowledge is under a grave threat. The cause? Rapid technological and software development.
For instance, when you upload 500 photos to your computer, say in iPhoto, how do you know they're secure? If all your music is on iTunes, or some other music storage software, how do you know they'll be simply included in the next OSX upload?
A friend of mind told me the other day that most of his library is made up of e-books, with much of it backed up on DropBox. When I questioned him about how confident he felt about their security, he initially replied, "Well, I have them backed up on two other computers." "Yes," I continued, "but how do you know DropBox won't at some point delete them, and the software on your computers rejects them in the next system update?"
Vint Cerf calls this threat that of "bit rot": when old computer files become worthless junk.
The irony at the heart of all of this is that we as a civilization are going to great lengths to protect and restore our knowledge hundreds of years into the future--the reason for technology--and yet the very tools we are using are actually threatening its survival.
According to Cerf, if you care about your photos, print them out.
In this spirit, here are some tips for surviving bit rot, and helping the preservation of human knowledge at the same time:
1. Print stuff out: Hard copies of your files may seem outdated and cumbersome, but if you care about it, print it out. And this goes not only for photos, but also documents, and, if possible, e-books.
2. Buy real books: Over the past year I've been focusing my book buying on reference material, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, books on news headlines of the '80s and '90s, etc. Other books included in this search are those on survival, building stuff, and other practical guides to things that one would need to know should the internet get wiped out. With all the digitizing of knowledge, this is a great time to buy books. Everyone should have a small (or large) library in their homes.
3. Buy real music: If you love your music collection, consider backing it up in the real world, that is on record or CD. There are communities of 'vintage' users of such forms of media through which you can find record players, and even have them serviced. Compared to carrying thousands of songs on your phone, having a library of vinyl seems barbaric. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who has awakened one day to find half my digital music library lost during some systems update.
4. Support libraries and book stores: While libraries seem to be in a renascence, book stores are fading out like rainforest trees; and yet, they are the true gate keepers of human knowledge. Indeed, books can be damaged through flood and fire; however, it's still a very secure way of having long-lasting information. Reading and collecting books that are two-hundred years old is nothing extraordinary. If bookstores complete die out, then that means our books have become primarily digital, and thus vulnerable.
5. Consider a typewriter: If you're working on valuable documents, it might not be a bad idea to work on it first on a typewriter--at least you'll always have a hard-copy, and you can scan it to your computer if need be.
6. Handwrite notes: I carry several little notebooks and a pen around--people think I'm crazy; but I'm always looking for the next idea, and I no longer trust note apps on my phone to keep track of it all for me. If it's in ink in a notebook, I don't have to worry about losing it. As well, if it's personal information, I don't have to worry about someone hacking into it.
Again, according to Cerf, the problem is that we have all this digital information whose bits may be preserved, but if we lack the proper software to interpret the bits into accessible information, we are out of luck. The larger issue is that for the first time in human civilization, we are creating information in a form whose long-term survival is not uncertain. And if we don't correct this, Cerf concludes, our generation may be a forgotten one.
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