Cultural Suicide via Digitalization, by Ted Rall

NEW YORK--Compact discs won't skip. They'll play even if you scratch them. Unless you break them or set them on fire, they'll last forever. That's the sales pitch the recording industry used to convince America to switch from vinyl records to CDs. But, as anyone who owns a hairy dog or cat knows, CDs do skip. And as anyone who uses them to store computer files knows, digital data stored on them eventually vanishes in a mysterious phenomenon called "data rot." "With proper care this Compact Disc will last a lifetime," promised the packaging on the first digital recordings. Now experts wonder whether they'll make it 20 years.

Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria.

Data is created in a bewildering variety of programs, even within the same type of application (say, word processing). Few are interchangeable, differing operating systems conflict within the same program, and they go out of date with alarming speed. Files created in WordPerfect, until fairly recently the nation's dominant word processing program, are quickly becoming as irretrievable as ragtime songs recorded on brown wax phonograph cylinders. It is conceivable that a few librarians will keep around some antique Wangs and Commodore 64s in order to access digital archives. And a tiny proportion of data will be transferred and adapted to successor formats. But for most computer users, data created on obsolete software and hardware might as well have never existed.


There are two kinds of digital data storage media: magnetic and optical. Zip and Jaz discs, heirs to the floppies of the '90s, get corrupted from "magnetic particle instability," "tape lubricant loss," "self-demagnetization," and exposure to electromagnetic devices (like computers and other electronic gadgets). Once you hear what Zip disc users call the "click of death," it's over. Digital data works on the pass/fail basis: it's either all available or it's all gone.
Recordable CDs and DVDs have mostly replaced magnetic storage devices. But those go bad too. CDs and DVDs, explains USA Today tech writer Andrew Cantor, "have two layers encased in clear plastic: a reflective layer and a transparent dye layer. When you 'burn' a disc, your CD or DVD writer fires a laser at that dye to create dark spots that don't let the reflective coating shine through. Your computer reads the dark and reflective spots as the ones and zeros of your data. But some dyes are better than others. After a while those burned-in opaque spots start to get less opaque. The disc fails."

It is impossible to fathom how much of our cultural patrimony has been lost to the failings of analog storage devices. Paper burns, film disintegrates, canvas molders. But there are two crucial differences between these pre-digital formats and what we're leaving future generations of historians. First, analog isn't pass/fail. You can see, and possibly restore, a stained or faded photograph. Moreover, while the majority of books printed 400 years ago have been destroyed, a few remain. Those survivors provide a tantalizing glimpse into the larger lost history. Had they been stored digitally, however, the loss would have been total: Every word of every last one would have succumbed to data rot.

Is there an alternative? Cantor says yes: "For long-term storage of documents, you can't beat paper."

This is an issue like global warming, one with such devastating implications and calling for such Herculean solutions that most people would rather not think about it. And like global warming, it's a problem that we simply have to solve.

Our ancestors left us records describing how they lived, starting with the clay tablets of hieroglyphs that ancient Sumerians used as sales receipts on up through FDR's personal letters to Churchill (typed on paper, with several carbon copies for redundant storage in scattered government warehouses). We owe the same to those whose past is our present. Government and business must lead the way. Unless we start backing up and storing everything of importance on more reliable media like paper and photographic film, however, we will betray that obligation. Our songs, our stories, our controversies, the rich tapestry of life at this particular place at this particular time will all be lost. We'll be dead; worse than that, it will be as if we had never existed.

The author's logic is very problematic, IMHO.

CDs aren't the only digital media that will ever be available. Besides, we will always have digital plaintext, in ASCII or Unicode (UTF-8, etc. etc.).

Bah. A way too negative tone.

Manipulation of historic facts is hardly a trait of the digital age.


I don't really know how the situation is with Word Perfect but at least MS Office and Open Office seem to support a lot of the oddball formats. Then it isn't even mentioned that using such a specific application for long term storage of document is a rather questionable choice. .txt's of many years old still work fine. And keeping data like music and video analogue does not guarantee "most users" will be able to keep playing it either. I currently live in a house where no VHS tape, cassette tape or vinyl record can be played. How many people can play 35mm film at home?



This is just plain false. Many digital formats have some form of error recovery. A little scratch on your CD does not render it completely unplayable. It is not any different from a worm eating a few pages out of a paper book.


There is no need for an alternative. There is need for a change of mind from the author. He seems to suggest that the only right way of storing documents is to put it on paper and store it in an old basement never to be looked at for the next 400 years. He forgets that eventually also paper will turn to dust and that the information is lost then anyway.

Therefor, the most important thing in preserving data is not the storage medium itself, but the ability to transfer the information from one medium to another. So what if my CDs go bad in even 5 years (I have CDs in good condition much older than that, but ok). I can quite effortlessly make perfect a copy of them before that happens. With analogue to analogue transfer, the copy is not perfect and/or takes a large amount of effort (try copying 100 books for fun some time).

So we may have to transfer the digital data from medium to medium every so many years and perhaps even convert the format of it, but this does guarantee us perfect condition of it. A small price to pay for very important documents. I call this 'active' preservation.


Somehow I won't regret it if in a 100 years from now no one remembers N'Sync, the Backstreet Boys and the whole 80's.

Funny.... It was paper storage that had us lose the Library of Alexandria:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/malexanderlibrary.html.

Besides, if you don't use seriously dangerous compressions techniques, you can lose a few bits here and there and not lose EVERYTHING.

FWIW, I still have CD's I bought in 1983 that play fine. I think this guy is a closet Luddite.

But the CD's error recovery mechanism is so very complicated that it might be useless to future generations.

Think about time thousand years from now. After a couple of nuclear wars and near-extinctions the human race may know nothing about current computer systems. Suppose that some future anthropologist discover a vault of CDs from the 21st century that are miraculously preserved, despite nuclear warfare, data rot and all that. What use are those CDs to the anthropologist?

Extraction and utilization of data from a CD requires incrediably sophisticated combination of hardware and software. Just manufacturing the hardware for the job requires pretty much all of our current collective knowledge in physics, including quantum mechanics, electronics and engineering. Writing the software to interpret the data is an order-of-magnitude simpler task, but still a pretty amazing feat, especially for the future anthropologists who have only the CDs and nothing else.

There is no way, and I repeat, absolutely no way that any modern engineer or scientist could reverse engineer the Solomon-Reed encoding used in CD's from scratch with zero prior knowledge of the matter. I don't think post-apocalyptic anthropologists and engineers of 31st century will be any different. To them the CD is like a mysterious alien artifact to us - it might contain some incrediably valuable ancient knowledge (such as account records of a 21st century corporation ) or it might be a just piece of jewelry.


There's no such thing as plain text. Future scientists will only see stream of 1011100100011100... and so on, provided they perform the miraculous feat of learning how to read the media. They might not realize the ones and zeroes are structured in octets. They might know nothing about ASCII or any other encodings; indeed the fact the seemingly random stream of ones and zeros even contain coherent data may completely escape their grasp.

The so called 'plain text' is not universal and future-proof. It relies on the reader having the hardware to read the data and being able to interpret a very specific character encoding, namely US-ASCII, or even worse, an extended character set.

Future anthropologists deciphering 'plain text' on CD might as well be deciphering DES encrypted data since the data is stored in a mystical device they know nothing about and don't possess the necessary hardware to read it.

You forget that after such apocalyptic events and such a long time, this is just as true for any current language, any current alphabet and any current numerical system. After a few nukes, how many Rosetta stones will survive, if there even will be any that are usable?

But then the chance of recovering from a global nuclear war is probably even smaller than such a war ever to happen.

True, true and true. But it's an order of magnitude easier deciphering a piece of paper (or stone) which has obviously man-made symbols written on it it with ink visible to naked eye than figuring out how to read an encrypted .rar file from a Jaz disk. And they still have to decipher the language after figuring out a way to read the storage media! Given that virtually no evolution happens in thousand years, I very strongly doubt that people then will be smart enough to do all that. But they might be smart enough to read the paper hardcopy.

I'm not worried about cultural material surviving a nice, hard nuking, I'm worried about the culture. Nukes don't do that much damage anyway. Any decent-sized volcaning eruption releases more energy than all mankind's existing nuclear weaponry combined. Not to mention earthquakes, or (heaven's sake!) comets. That is to say we cannot possibly match the incrediable destructive power exerted by the planet and the universe on a daily basis. The universe has a history of setting evolution on earth back a twenty million years on a regular basis by pounding it with rocks, volcanos, ice ages and such. So if we don't do it ourselves, the planet's bound to do us in.

The best thing we could do would probably be sending another Voyager I, addressed to ourselves, to some nice, stable, orbit. There's a very real possibility that it could be preserved even for the evolutionary successors of homo sapiens even 100 million years from now if the conditions are right. On earth, with the extremely unstable surface and all, nothing man-made is likely to last tens of millions of years.


Yes, such a war in inprobable in short-term future. But in a thousand year period it's bound to happen. Actually, I can raise a wager for it. I bet you $50 that there'll be a nuclear war in the next thousand years

Well, you guys can worry abnout what is happening in a thousand years, I am working on what is happening now.

In a thousand years... no in 100 years... no even less...

Permanent on-chip data storage will be capable of writing 100 GB of data in a chip not larger than a postage stamp. Being permanent PROM-style chips, it is not erasable by electric pulse or magnetic fields, and as long as the pins are not corroded, it will forever be readable.

Since such chips are small, a tough Titanium Samsonite briefcase will hold... oh possibly 1 million of such chips.

Perhaps 100 of the chips will be colored Red. In it is a singlefile called "ReadMe.txt", "LiesMich.txt", or whatever... telling in plain 7-bit ASCII how to decode the data in .pdf, .flac, .whathaveyous... in short, not mere "Use Acrobat Reader to open .pdf files" but also the format of those files, etc. And perhaps some folders containing application installers.

1000 of those briefcase will be produced. Just in case, each briefcase will also hold a very small computer (e.g. Samsung Q1) capable of reading the chips, with the operating system (whatever) and relevant apps already hard-wired... again programmed using PROM chips.

The briefcases will then be vacuum-pumped, sealed with Silicone sealant, and buried under Obelisks all around the world, in a Lead-lined vacuum-pumped sealed Steel Chambers about 50m under each Obelisks. The suitcases should be stored in pairs.

How's that for an SF backstory?

"Is digitalization a cultural suicide ?"

No, just a linguistic atrocity....



digitalization

One entry found for digitalization.

Main Entry: dig·i·ta·li·za·tion
Pronunciation: "di-j&-t&l-&-'zA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: digitalis
the administration of digitalis until the desired physiological adjustment is attained; also the bodily state so produced.