Google and Permanence
February 13, 2015
It is Friday the 13th, and I think a black cat has walked across Google’s parking lot. I read “Digital Dark Age could Leave Historians with No Records of the 21st Century.” The write up paints a gloomy picture for the folks who want to learn about the go go life in Silicon Valley a century hence. Digital content is ephemeral.
What about content management? What about the copies of the Web parked on Amazon’s servers? What about the archives of the government entities tucking away every zero and one?
Nope. Unless a person prints out a copy of a document or a picture, that content will be lost. The Dark Age. Scary.
According to the write up:
“In our zeal to get excited about digitizing we digitize photographs thinking it’s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong,” he said. “I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out.”
Who makes this statement? A Googler. The fellow who helped make the Internet come into being. The print out advocate is Vint Cerf.
Trees, are you listening? Millinocket, Maine (the magic city), you have a future. The paper mills will reopen. Humans who are skilled indexers will be back in business. And Googlers are wrong a vanishingly small percentage of the time. Just think about Loon balloons and Google Glass. Consider the relevance of Google search results which make “all the world’s information” findable.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2015
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