{"id":205,"date":"2008-10-29T04:40:51","date_gmt":"2008-10-29T10:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/?p=205"},"modified":"2008-10-29T04:43:17","modified_gmt":"2008-10-29T10:43:17","slug":"researcher-warns-of-digital-dark-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/2008\/10\/29\/researcher-warns-of-digital-dark-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Researcher Warns of ‘Digital Dark Age’"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the perils of the migration to digital format for books, magazines and newspapers is the threat to future generations of researchers.\u00a0 In fact, one researcher warns that if the current trend continues we could be headed for what he calls a “digital dark age,”<\/a> according to\u00a0 Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science<\/a>, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.\u00a0 \u00a0 The problem is accessibility.\u00a0 Think about trying to play a VHS tape when there are only DVD players around. \u00a0 Several generations from now, much of the data we produce could be lost to inaccessibility. \u00a0 And, there’s a lot of digital content, some 369 exabytes at last count.<\/p>\n

This has very real implications for sociologists and not just those of us interested in digital culture.\u00a0 A wide range of cultural products (think music or film) and large data sets (think GSS or the census data) are vulnerable to being lost in the “black hole” of inaccessibility.\u00a0\u00a0 Part of the problem is proprietary software.\u00a0\u00a0 Remember WordPerfect?\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps you don’t, but it was a word-processing software product popular about ten years ago.\u00a0 Today, no one’s using and few people have heard of it.\u00a0 If you get a file that’s saved as a WordPerfect document, chances are you won’t be able to open the file and whatever content is in there is effectively lost.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 McDonough argues that part of the solution to the threat of a “digital dark age” is open source software.\u00a0\u00a0 So, for example, instead of using Microsoft Office’s proprietary “Word” program, if more people used OpenOffice (an open source word processing program), digital content would be less vulnerable to unintentional loss.<\/p>\n

That’s only part of the solution, however, as digital content is also vulnerable to deliberate erasure:<\/p>\n

\u201cE-mail is a classic example of that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt runs both the modern business world and government. If that information is lost, you\u2019ve lost the archive of what has actually happened in the modern world. We\u2019ve seen a couple of examples of this so far.\u201d McDonough cited the missing White House e-mail archive from the run-up to the Iraq War, a violation of the Presidential Records Act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The power to erase content, and along with it, important parts of the historical record is not new.\u00a0 This is something that sociologist Poulantzas warned about thirty years ago in his Political Power & Social Classes<\/a>. \u00a0 The difference with digital content is that this sort of information-power-move is much easier to accomplish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, some are taking note of this threat, and working on preservation through a variety of digital collections<\/a>, but sociologists would be wise to take note of this trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the perils of the migration to digital format for books, magazines and newspapers is the threat to future generations of researchers.\u00a0 In fact, one researcher warns that if the current trend continues we could be headed for what he calls a “digital dark age,” according to\u00a0 Jerome P. McDonough, assistant professor in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[757],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-digital-content"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}