The Age of the Fleeting Format

In our digital age, information is preserved forever, but our ability to access that information is increasingly under threat.

Transitory, fleeting, useless. These are the words that came to mind when my sister passed on a virtually (no pun intended) unused copy of her Complete National Geographic on 31 CDs (110 years of, well, nothing). We looked at the box dubiously (Now featuring Windows 98! it screamed), but figured it was worth loading it. It wasn’t. We couldn’t get it to work. Having trolled the National Geographic website in the usual fruitless quest for help, I found succor in my world-wide-net pals, the best of whom explains his own travails with the company. Our Geographic is timeless all right – we’ll never access it again. This problem isn’t just mine.

What the digital environment has promised us is an end to destruction –no more burning libraries of Alexandria without any backup existing, no more lost data, perfect copies of everything lasting forever. According to my definition, “forever” is synonymous with “eternity,” “infinity,” or more plainly, “a really long time.” The computer consumer and market understands the word differently. “Forever” means until the next system iteration (a year), hardware upgrade (annual), or dreaded weekly sale flyer. Take your own past: search for a computer you had at least 10 years ago. A website featuring an image of a calm body of water is offering the first computer I ever owned (a Mac SE), for roughly a three-thousandth of its original worth. I had that machine longer than any other computer: five years. Since then I’ve had to turn computers over more regularly than vegetables in the microwave.

When we talk about format persistence, we’re really talking about death. We expect our zillions of pictures and videos to be viewable in the next 20 or even a hundred years, a notion we base on rare and expensive photos taken by relatives (the negatives may or may not be in someone’s attic, third box from the left). Print your pictures? How long do they last? What kind of paper are you printing on? Is the ink permanent or fugitive (which means the colour leaches out of the image until it all looks like a phantom parade)? After a few years, expect there to be nothing. If you’re not paying top dollar for real photofinishing, look while you can.

You could try waiting for machine stability. Formats and the way we save information will go on changing, probably more quickly than they do now. Want to see images you took from six years ago? Save the machine you kept them on. Will your timeless .jpegs or .pngs be readable in five years? Why should they be? Apple has already rolled over their last photo format, and if you’ve updated iPhoto, kiss the ones formatted before 2006 goodbye. You can save documents and pictures, back them up all you like. They’re all digital, we’ve been told so often, so they’ll always be readable in the universal language of zeros and ones (but here’s a hint: after a while there’ll be more of the former than the latter).

Don’t worry about floppy disks, you’ll chortle to me, I have stuff burned to CDs. Are they getting a tan (“bronzing”) in the box? Your memories are timeless because you’ll never see them again. There is no format consistency in a digital world driven by corporations making money, because persistence is bad for the economy. Nothing has yet proven to be as consistently readable as a book or printed music. RememberHildegard of Bingen? She wrote some chart-toppers in the middle of the 12th century. We still know them, and people still record them – good formatting! But digital bulwarks have yet to prove themselves. Just as National Geographic has done, manufacturers unconvincingly wring their hands in dismay and tell us to order the new version. Our loss is literally their gain: we’ll buy again – new software, hardware. Good for the economy. Not good for your memories and mine, though.

Don’t expect digital to save your memories and be retrievable. They can be saved, unread or unreadable, forever. Otherwise, forget it.