A mournful piece today from Jess Zimmerman, the Guardian's US columnist: One downside to digital innovation: as formats die, we lose our past.
Like many of her generation, she was an avid fan of Homestar Runner cartoons in the early 2000s. But now, with the demise of Flash, she can't see them anymore at homestarrunner.com. Her hope is that the owners of the content will invest in reproducing the cartoons on Youtube, or similar. But if not? Well, that's probably the end of it….
Digital content can survive through many generations – in theory – but survival requires constant maintenance and re-investment by the content's owners, to ensure that it is readable on new platforms and formats. And very often this does not happen.
Unlike, of course, with printed material. As Jess points out, while the internet struggles with formatting changes, "books, an unusually obsolescence-resistant format, have remained accessible for hundreds of years".
Her conclusion: "Our [digital] tech has aged with us, and like us, it's losing its memory."
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