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Your guide to the parish of Hartland in North Devon. From here you can find out more about the history of Hartland, tourism, businesses, activities and what's happening in Hartland. The website acts as an entry point for local information. |
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Comment: The new Dark Age is speeding up on us all and it could be you are to blame!
Those brought up on an Empirical style of taught history will be familiar with the notion that England went through an extended period when civilisation was barren of written word, decoration of social connects. We now know this is not the case and indeed some of our finest artifacts come from this period.
If we take the idea that a Dark Age is a period where future researchers can find little obvious information to enlighten on a period in our history, then are we not presently creating such a period? The means producing this non-information is the all encompassing technology (The Digital Society) that envelopes our lives in so many ways.
If we take a simple example that would be a part of most peoples lives – photographs. How many people today have photograph albums? If so then with confidence one could expect them to date from pre 1970s. No one makes albums today; images are taken in profusion, often on a whim, with such as mobile phones or digital cameras where they reside for a period. Some are downloaded onto a computer where they reside for a further extended period. Some are seen on occasions, mostly by accident when looking for a file. At some point the computer will fail – very few people make backups of their files (CDs/DVDs also fail after only a few years). The computer taken to a technician for repair, who has little interest in the content, will do a reformat/reinstall, in the process all is lost. People seem almost at ease with this today, that, information is transient, temporary of little value. But for future generations the insight into the lives being lived today is lost.
If we extend this out into our communities then a similar process can be seen for personal information, small societies, Parish Councils, small charities (even the Charity Commissioners only keep their digital information for around six years, I am told). One could extend this list at will. The point is that technology with its persona of temporary has been set into our mind set. People think little of hitting the delete key.
This process is denuding our societal records to a substantial amount of information. We are rapidly losing the minutiae of our lives. Do you keep you Emails, Texts, Tweets, Facebook interaction – no of course not, why would you its not like it’s a diary of your life is it?
Of course one can look around and see a number of bodies, institutions, individuals who are heavily engaged in a digital revolution. The bigger are digitising the Libraries, the smaller individual archive sources. In some ways this form of action is of use as the hard copy exists, so a digital file only has to perform as ease of delivery/access – it is not a substitute for the original. What is being lost is information that originated and existed only in digital format, mention was made of Emails etc but this can be extended to the new fashion for Ebooks (some only exist in this format) and such as spread-sheets, databases, presentations, documentation and much more. Technology will always move forward and as it does so it transforms, so we loose file formats, presentational method and the mechanical means of access to the media. This is being addressed within some academic study where data is being recovered for specific interests, I read recently of recovering the draft files for some well know authors from early computers. These academic interests will be limited and hint at what will have to become a massive on-going project whereby each and every digital file is upgraded into the latest (readable) file type and this would have to be repeated ad-infinitum. Now it does not take a great deal of insight to realise that at some point this information archive will become a consideration for cost cutting and then suffer that wonderful archivists term ‘Weeding’. A ‘considered’ opinion on what should be kept and what can be discarded.
If we leave the modern digital world and look at the archives that exists all over the country: I have been in and out of such for numerous years and never cease to be amazed at what can be found. It has to be accepted that often the contents of an archive are there by accident of fate – ‘Weeding’ undertaken on arbitrary practices within parishes/households over time. It is this act of fate that is the golden secret of document survival and the joy of discovery. The facilitating factor is that the records are physical items which can be viewed, searched, read with comparative ease. This is not the case with Digital media it depends on some form of physical or ethereal index which in turn leads you to the storage media on which the information is contained and then the means by which to interrogate or view it.
Overall one can view a period where the materials that by fate survive the digital ‘Weeding’ become obsolete due to the progress or redundancy of technology and therefore possibly lost. Indeed a possible Dark Age being made today.
Is it your fault? Are you providing the materials you produce in hard form not just digital, are these being stored in a safe fashion? One cannot keep every scrap of information but it is possible to ensure enough survives to explain how lives are being lived today.
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