15 October 2015
A Modern Dark Age?
The problems of communication and technology.
By Lynda Goetz
“We had a great walk” enthused my niece after an outing from our house the other week. “We saw some really cool cows! They had the hugest, cutest eyes,” she continued, thrusting her iPhone towards us to illustrate her point. I was slightly surprised. This was, after all, a girl who was studying English Literature at university. Why did she not use her verbal descriptive powers to inform us of what she had seen? Why the need for a very mediocre photo?
A related thought came to me more recently whilst cooking. I had found my old, much-used, battered paperback Penguin Cordon Bleu cookery book by Rosemary Hume and Muriel Downes. I had forgotten just how many recipes it had in it and how comprehensive it was. There was pretty much everything you needed to know about classic cookery. In contrast with modern cookery books, where often every recipe is beautifully photographed, there were no pictures.
Images and words, pictures and stories, photos and essays, so often the two go together. These days it would seem that we pay far more attention to the pictures than the words. Is this a new thing or simply our original focus regained? Drawings on cave walls in Lascaux, Peche Merle and other places show clearly how our cave dwelling ancestors used pictorial means to illustrate their hunting techniques and decorate their living spaces. Moving forward in time, many cultures around the world used illustrations to depict the heroic lives of their rulers and heroes. These were not only on vases, jugs, urns and plates, but on tombs and buildings – memorials that were recovered hundreds or even thousands of years later. Then came writing, first in the form of hieroglyphs, part symbol, part drawing and then, later, in forms that we recognise as closer to writing as we have come to know it today. Storytelling and news-giving ceased to be purely pictorial and oral, but gradually became written.
For many years, the ability to read and write was limited to those in power – either in the religious hierarchies around the world or those with political or commercial power. In fact, although for around one hundred and fifty years or thereabouts, in the Western world at least, we have had nearly universal literacy, in the overall historical context this is a minute amount of time. Reading and writing has not been the ‘norm’ for most of the population for much of history. Artists were even rarer. Now it is within the power of so many to capture a scene or an event with a picture, either of others or of themselves, and to use technology to share that picture instantly. The ‘written’ word is likewise no longer the preserve of those in power, nor a lot of the time is it actually written or even printed, but stored in digital form.
Rather alarmingly, in spite of this massive amount of communication and obvious technological advance, warnings have been given by people at the very centre of this technology that we run the risk of our era being ‘an information black hole’ as far as future generations are concerned. It has been pointed out recently by the former President of the Royal Society for Chemistry, Professor David Garner, that our own time could well go down in history as a Dark Age* unless more effort is made to preserve our digital data in formats that can be retrieved by future generations (Daily Telegraph 11th October). He cited the so-called Doomsday Project as a classic example of the problem whereby old technologies were superseded by new which could no longer access the old archives.
The Doomsday Project was a 1986 BBC project to create a computer-based multimedia version of the Doomsday Book to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original. By the 1990s the two virtually indestructible interactive video discs on which the information had been stored could no longer be read by the new generation of computers. It was apparently not until 2002 that software emulating the obsolete Acorn Microcomputer was created by a team at Leeds University. Meanwhile, of course, the original Doomsday book compiled by Norman monks in 1086 remained available to view in the National Archives in Kew. As technology moves ever more quickly, problems of this kind are, unless we are careful, going to occur with increasing frequency. Professor Garner’s view is that we need to back-up a lot of vital information in paper form if we want it to be available to future generations.
Vint Cerf, the president of Google, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in California earlier in the year, used the same analogy of the Dark Ages when he warned people to print out treasured photos so that they were not lost through outdated operating systems. He said that he felt a ‘great burden’ to find a way to create digital formats which can still be accessed in thousands of years’. What he wants to achieve is a system which will not only store a digital format, but ensure that the system can be recreated in the future by preserving details of the software and operating system needed to access it. Mr Cerf pointed out that people who are saving their digital photographs on computers, phones or devices are losing them ‘because they are just files of bits. The file system doesn’t know how to interpret them, you need software to do that’.
Professor Garner and Vint Cerf are ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’, but in some ways their belief in paper as a ‘safe’ format, is, I would suggest, somewhat misguided. Although Prof Garner says that, “Print has the advantage of being technology-independent and so is always going to provide an alternative, safe backup,” he appears to be conveniently forgetting or ignoring the fact that paper is by no means indestructible. A lot of modern paper is of such low-grade quality that its longevity is by no means assured, as my disintegrating paperback copy of The Cordon Bleu Cookery book shows only too clearly. Printed colour photos all too often fade, as a glance through your old photo albums will confirm. Not only that, but paper archives, otherwise known as libraries, are by no means immune from all forms of destruction, whether it be deliberately by man or by natural disaster, as the historical evidence shows.
From the Xianyang Palace and State archives destroyed in 206BC and the library of Antioch in 364AD, to the Mosul Public Library in Iraq in February of this year (where 8,000 ancient manuscripts were destroyed by ISIL) more destruction has been caused by deliberate politically-motivated action than has ever been caused by naturally occurring damage of any kind. So, although it is true to say, as Professor Garner does, that ‘a book can be left on a shelf for hundreds of years with little damage, information can suffer ‘bit rot’ where it can no longer be accessed’, it is also the case that paper may not necessarily be the answer either, especially considering the amount of information there is to be stored from this over-populated, over-communicative period in history. The way forward may well be a combination of traditional archiving of ‘important’ documents in libraries and Vint Cerf’s aspiration of a digital archiving system that will last a thousand years. It does seem rather ironic that our information age could well impart less to future generations than some of our forebears did with their pictures on cave walls.
*The so-called Dark Ages in Europe were the centuries between around 500AD after the collapse of the Roman Empire until around 1000AD, although it is a much debated term and nowadays less used than it once was as more is discovered about this period of history. At one time it was even applied to the whole of the Middle Ages.
