The digital effect: losing our written history.

The digital age has changed everything.

If you read the biography of John Adams by David McCullough, you know that that wonderful  book was based entirely on letters from the lifetime of one of our country’s most important founders. Think about this: if John Adams were living today, how much of his correspondence would survive?

Being part of the digital age means that we are required to do more than merely write – we must know how our particular computer works. That knowledge is now part and parcel to knowing how to use that digital tool to write. We don’t sit down to draft a letter; we create a “doc,” assign a sub-folder, give it a title, and then we save the doc and fiddle with it multiple times before actually using it.

When we e-mail, do we know if our messages are saved? I certainly don’t save every single e-mail I receive. Why? I’m thinking about my computer’s e-mail program more than the messages. I’m thinking that it’s overwhelming to see 4,000+ messages in my in-box. So, every few months, starting from the bottom, I highlight and delete. And that would seem to be common practice for pretty much everyone.

Imagine what that means for our written history.

While a digitized data world means that now we can store an entire basement’s worth of files on a tiny hard drive, managing that trove has proven overwhelming. And it’s become a problem for corporations of every size since data retention is now a legal requirement for many business and government sectors.

Our society is now our data.

The modern world could not function without information. We cultivate and harvest information the way our agrarian ancestors worked the land. We no longer work directly to produce what sustains us – instead we produce goods and services that are proffered and supported with communication, from marketing to manuals.

We also no longer identify ourselves, when challenged, as the son or daughter, brother or sister, niece or nephew of so-and-so, but instead must produce documentation that defines and validates us.

This information is also not limited to the kind referred to as “data.” While data is a product of the “Information Age,” the kind of information that forms the core of our society is significantly more far-reaching. Birth certificates, school records, social security statistics, building plans, mortgages, aircraft records and nuclear facility specifications make up the kind of information that’s vital to our continuity. It just happens to be a fact that much of it is now digitized.

Too often, the importance of this information isn’t recognized until it’s urgently needed. Personal lawsuits, corporate litigation and disasters can impact the need for information that was once considered not worth saving. And not being able to access this much-needed information can change the course of lives.

Old, paper-based filing systems had the advantage of transparent logic. Ever try to find a doc on someone else’s computer system? I have and it can prove an impossible task.

The way we save data keeps changing.

Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, stated that digital technology would be virtually re-invented every two years. (Specifically, he was talking about the number of transistors in a CPU doubling every two years.) That statement became “Moore’s law,” which defined how rapidly our data management systems would change. Today, that time period can be as short as six months.

In the face of such continual technological change, it’s not surprising that we’re all faced with increasingly rapid computer obsolescence. And every time we replace a computer or data device, we may be losing more of our written history.

The author of a New York Times article titled The Virtual Attic describes some of the changes through the years that have meant replacing the computers on which work was done and writing was saved. The first computer I bought (an IBM PC) had two 5 1/4″ floppy drives and no hard drive. (It also had a “green” screen – no color, no graphics, just green, glowing text – and cost $3400.) Do you remember loading programs that meant swapping out a dozen or more of those floppies?

I was living in a Manhattan co-op apartment when I’d bought that computer and when I put the apartment on the market Joyce Carol Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith, came to look at it. But they  were far more intrigued by the monster computer on my desk. “Doesn’t it give you migraines?” Smith asked. They were both writers who had not yet begun working with computers, and I found myself spending more time describing what that was like than the renovations of the West 67th Street one-bedroom.

What will be left of your story?

Eventually I migrated what I felt needed saving onto the “newer” 3 1/2″ floppies, then onto CDs, and now anything that seemed important over the years has been backed-up onto hard drives. But what was lost? What was left behind? While I may have been using computers since the mid-to-late 1980s to write, I certainly don’t have any of the e-mails from that far back. Do you?

What will people know of us when we’re gone and all that’s left is a hard drive or e-mails account that’s very likely password-protected? Will people scour our e-mail to see what kinds of thoughts we put down to good friends and life partners as David McCullough did with letters for his book on Adams? Will our personal history evaporate when our computers are donated or recycled?

I find it fascinating and mind-boggling that the letters of people who wrote with quill dip pens may ultimately be more durable than anything from this digital age.

(This just in:  a. Google apologizes for Gmail bug that shook 150,000 users; b. NY Times – The Digital Pileup (or … “we’re saving too much”)