Shining a light on the digital dark age

One area where I expect this digital rot to have significant effects is with obituaries. It will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.

Obituaries that appeared in print newspapers during the 20th century were easily disseminated and decentrally archived (typically by loved ones and libraries), making them relatively rot-tolerant.

Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect.

But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot. They tend to be centrally archived and often behind paywalls, making them susceptible to digital rot and difficult for organizations acting in the public interest to archive.

The for-profit company Legacy.com controls a strikingly large share of the market for digital obituaries. It partners with funeral homes and newspapers, and in many cases when a visitor browses obituaries on the website of a local newspaper or funeral home, they’re actually redirected to Legacy.com, which hosts the content.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and funeral homes themselves often don’t maintain their own copies of the obituaries. What happens if Legacy.com or one of the smaller memorial sites goes out of business or experiences some sort of data loss? Because of the centralized nature of how these digital obituaries are stored, it’s possible that very few other organizations will have archived copies of the content.

Are we currently in a Digital Dark Age because the pace of content creation has far outstripped our ability to preserve that content for posterity?

Obviously we can’t be sure how the current era will be viewed from the far future, but your comment made me realize that the current situation has similarities to that dark age.

We should think of digital information more as graffiti. It won’t be around forever, I’ve seen most of the old web that I experienced as a child simply disappear, nothing but a memory now. Enjoy information while you have it, eventually it will be lost, like tears in the rain.

IMO social media got a little better once temporary stories came out.

Slack’s limited search history is a feature too - forces you to document using appropriate tools and not endless email threads…

I love to see more interest in the topic of digital continuity.

My philosophy around this is "File over app" — if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

https://stephanango.com/file-over-app