Digital Archaeology - What Are We Leaving Behind?
by Ewan Spence
Before I go on, you really should head over to Kathryn and Daniel’s Flickr set that inspired this post.
Anyway, this Flickr set has sparked a question in my head – the set itself was the traditional unboxing that any Apple fan does on getting a new product, except in this case it was an old (yet unopened) Apple IIc. The comments are a stream of memories, questions and observations that reminded me of a group of Archaeologists looking over some fossils. One comment to illustrate the fun, from Brad Graham… I double-dog dare you to tote that thing up to a Genius Bar, put on your innocent face and say, “Something went wonky with my Leopard install. Can you have a look?”
So here’s what sparked. How many text messages did you get yesterday? Last week? Last month? How about multimedia messages? Quick snaps that were never mailed to Flickr? My guess is they’ve been deleted from your phone, never to be seen again. In the digital age, we were promised, everything would be available, we’ll never have to worry about finding anything every again.
Turns out that the d in digital is more like disposable. How much information have you trashed out of your mobile phone in the recent past? We spend hours and hours each month (well, I do) trying to archive our deskbound emails, but with more and more SMS and MMS messages, more pictures, and now more and more video. How much of that are you saving?
Yes there are partner applications to capture this data on your PC (Nokia’s Lifeblog for one), and store it for you, but these are few and far between – and really only aiming at the higher end phones at the moment. Even if you have a compatible phone, how many are using this feature? And then archiving the results somewhere safe? Or are we trusting Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa to treasure our memories?
Yes, there are benefits to digital – if Kennedy was to be assassinated today the number of smartphone videos, camera shots and digital witnesses would surely make any Warren 2.0 Commission’s job much easier – but if you go into the archives of analogue photography then you have lots of negatives and factual ‘colour’ around the Pullitzer Shot. Nowadays these would be deleted in the field. Or they send back only the cropped resized version to the news desk.
How much are we loosing from our heritage every day?
