Hundreds of years from now computer mediated anthropologists will be faced with an enormous problem -- making sense of trillions upon trillions of digital images.
Photo Credit: Slapstart
Many of these pictures will be made by amateurs, average citizens who use a camera phone or another device to record their day-to-day experiences. It is difficult to imagine what the future hold, but the proliferation of images made by amateurs and professionals is increasing exponentially. Imagine how historians and anthropologists will have to sift through the millions of images just to understand a single event.
Let's pretend for argument sake that these academic types begin their exhumation of our digital footprints on September 11, 2001 and end in 2100.
What will they find?
First and foremost, we have to assume that the majority of the digital files stored today may not be available to us in 100 years. Images that may survive will be found on an antiquated array of storage technologies such as CDs, DVDs, hard drive external drives, and computer servers. Unfortunately, billions of image will be lost simply because their creators failed to understand the impermance of media. Protecting digital images is clearly not on the agenda of average computer user.
The greatest threat to image storage today is the inability to understand how antiquated computer technologies are being replaced by newer ones at an unprecedated speed.
The Internet has created a causeway for millions of people to store and share their images. Thanks to the digital camera, camera phones and the Internet, the world has witnessed the worst and the best of the human condition. Pictures of tortured prisoners in Iraq, aircraft accidents, banned images of flag-draped coffins, and many other events flit across screens around the world. Photosharing sites such as Flickr and Photobucket, as well as microblogging services like Twitpic have changed the way people create and use pictures.
From phonograph records, beta and VHS video, as well as chemical-based film, the shift from analog technologies to digital has had a tremendous impact on how we record and remember the past. No media is permanent, however, what we need to remember is that challenges of preservation are resides in quantity and longevity. Digital capture and storage media have already seen a move toward cheaper and faster materials.
Floppy and Zip disks have been replaced by external multimedia drives. We have moved from kilobytes to terabytes of storage in a matter of a decade. Pictures live in the real space of our computer hard drives but also in the virtual domain of cyberspace. We have come to trust our memorable past -- our pictorial treasures -- to the likes of Shutterfly, Facebook and Flickr. We have come to trust our computer and external drives without considering that the machines that can read these digital files today, may not be able to in a hundred years from now. The pictures that survive in the future will be those that have been carefully curated by owners who understand the tenuous nature of digital technologies.
The best way to guarantee that our images will be around decades from now is to promote digital literacy. When a friend was presented with a 500 gigabyte external drive to preserve his images, the device was promptly put aside. A year later, it was still sitting around collecting dust. Why? One might get the impression that the idea of backup files can be attributed to apathy and a sense of image immortality.
Our culture teaches us that "redundancy" is a bad thing. Get to the point and don't repeat yourself. It's not this way in the realm of digital storage. Picture need to have several homes -- on the computer's hard drive, on external drives, DVDs and CDs, and Online. Any one who has lived through a computer crash, where all the data was rendered irretrievable, understands the perilous dangers of computer technologies.
Our culture is accustomed to collecting personal images in scrapbooks and not in a computer folder. Pictures of significant events are typically categorized and organized chronologically, not so with computers. For many, digital images stored on a computer are the source of great angst and frustration. Finding images and electronically editing the images for size, color, and tone can be time consuming and costly to print. Many Online services provide solutions, but do we really know how if the ink and paper used will survive for future generations. Photographs printed in the 19th and 20th centuries may actually have more longevity than the pictures printed today.
At the same time, one of the many advantage of digital image technology is the ability to share images with others. Online photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Zoto, Smugmug, Scrapblog, and Snapfish provide users with a place to share, comment and organize the photographs they upload. For example, in 2008 Flickr had more than 27 million visitors. Many of the images on these photo-sharing sites demonstrate importance of the "visual" in our culture. The gap between what someone with a smart phone or a digital point and shoot can produce in terms of technological capacities is closing in on more professional digital single lens reflect cameras. Imperfect as they may be, the digital snaps of life fulfill a basic human need to recall and remember our presence on earth. In an age of immediacy and impermanence, it is too easy to overlook the future as we focus on the past.