Navigating the ‘Digital Dark Age’: A Guide to Safeguarding Your Photos, Videos, and Data

Learn practical steps to navigate the challenges of the ‘Digital Dark Age’ and protect your cherished photos, videos, and data. Discover essential tips for preserving your digital memories in this insightful guide.

If you’ve grown up surrounded by social media, chances are you’ve amassed a considerable collection of photos over the past couple of decades – perhaps more than you could ever recall. The advent of mobile phones as cameras turned social media into a communal photo album, storing memories online seemingly indefinitely. But is this permanence just an illusion?

The year 2019 witnessed MySpace losing a staggering 12 years’ worth of music and photos, impacting over 14 million artists and 50 million tracks. Imagine if Instagram or the entire internet vanished suddenly – would you still have access to those precious memories? We find ourselves in what’s now coined a “digital dark age,” a term popularized by information specialist Terry Kuny in 1997. He warned of an era where much of our electronically coded knowledge might be lost forever, drawing parallels to medieval monks preserving books for future generations.

Contrary to the belief that the internet is everlasting, digital artifacts such as photos and videos are inherently unstable and impermanent. Linkrot, the disappearance of important sources due to deleted webpages, is a common occurrence. Hardware becomes obsolete, degrades, and undergoes upgrades, while bit-rot threatens the physical accessibility of past data.

As technology progresses, many struggle to use outdated software, especially when faced with the lack of backward compatibility. This raises concerns about how future generations will access data stored in obsolete formats. Additionally, issues related to data ownership arise, particularly when controlled by private corporations. Families have encountered legal hurdles trying to access the social media accounts of deceased loved ones, highlighting the complexities surrounding digital legacies.

In the midst of this new digital dark age, we often fail to recognize the shift to an increasingly digital life. From Google smart homes to contact-tracing technology, our existence is becoming more entwined with digital elements. Identity verification and access to data are tied to apps, the internet, and social media accounts. The transient nature of data, with features like disappearing messages on Snapchat and WhatsApp, has become the norm.

Moreover, the pursuit of environmental sustainability has led us to embrace digital formats, seemingly responsible for reducing our carbon footprint. Yet, we seldom consider the e-waste generated in the process. Data protection laws now provide the right to have personal data erased, reflecting concerns about privacy and potential threats like identity theft, cyberstalking, cyberbullying, and online grooming.

Amid these valid concerns, there are compelling reasons to contemplate how we preserve our digital artifacts and essential data. If your phone went missing, could you recall important numbers or navigate without digital assistance? If not, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your approach to data preservation.

Preserving data should not be left solely to digital archivists and preservationists; it’s a responsibility we all share. When organized efforts are made to preserve data, decisions about what to keep can become as much a political as a technological issue.

To safeguard your digital memories, consider employing various services and taking steps to prevent data loss: maintain multiple copies in different formats across various devices, regularly migrate data to newer devices, and embrace the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) for easy preservation and access.

Moreover, rediscover analog trends such as board games, vinyl records, or the resurgence of Polaroid cameras. Numerous services exist to convert digital photos into printed formats, albums, and physical artwork. In case you encounter a broken link or missing data, explore data preservation initiatives like the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project or the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library offering free digital books, movies, software, music, and websites.

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