Digital amnesia

Digital amnesia is the phenomenon of knowledge being lost to humanity as a result of technological progress in the digital age.
Causes
‘Digital Amnesia’ is a term coined in the 1990s to refer to the idea of lost digital knowledge due to the rapid pace of change of the hardware and software it depends on. The concept can be expanded to include all knowledge lost as a consequence of the pace of change in the rapidly growing digital structures many institutions are creating. Thus, digital amnesia is not exclusively the result of computer and application obsolescence in a converged digital world, but includes processes, people, policies, and ethical decisions. Given the growing reliance on digital information, particularly in developed nations, the potential harm is far reaching. The further that stores of knowledge are designed to be accessible from anywhere by anyone on a digital network, the more transient and vulnerable to digital amnesia the knowledge becomes. Knowledge access and its long term sustainability have generally been inversely related since the civilization’s first written records. This divergence accelerated as the information storage paradigm changed from an evolutionary transition of media (written language on tablet, scroll, codex, etc) to a wholesale change in the way knowledge is kept. As observed, the digital model relies on an unbroken chain of migrations. The migrations need to be frequent enough (some estimate between five to ten years) to prevent media from becoming unreadable or obsolete. Any break can cause the digital information to be inaccessible without considerable resource commitment. Each migration relies on a decision-making process (corporate, private, government or cybernetic) that itself must be sustainable. These decisions will change or even remove data from our digital knowledge and memory. The very essence of knowledge becomes evolutionary based on decennary (sicsic) political, cultural decisions and economic conditions of the time. Thus, the implications and real magnitude of the digital transformation may not be understood for generations to come.
Digital amnesia may be due to hardware, software or human factors. Hardware examples include the transition from such obsolete technologies as punch cards, 5 1/4 drive, and the Zip drive. Software examples include files formatted in Harvard Graphics, Adobe PageMaker or WordStar. Human factors examples include programs that no one is trained to run or maintain. For example, the University of Southern California neurobiologist, Joe Miller, recently discovered he couldn't read magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking landings on Mars. With the data in an unknown format, he had to track down printouts and hire students to retype everything. "All the programmers had died or left NASA," Miller said. "It was hopeless to try to go back to the original tapes." Jerome P. McDonough cites "Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade." Additionally, "digital amnesia" may be used to describe the transient nature of web research sources. Files are also subject to generation loss: deterioration caused by migrations. Examples include lost document tables and charts or JPEG and MP3 manipulations.
Discussion
Digital Amnesia, unlike simple obsolescence, captures the concept of the transient state of our digital knowledge and its dependency on systems that are updated without regard to what is being lost. Obsolescence pertains to the equipment, the software and the technicians who operate on both. Digital amnesia's focus is the knowledge that is lost due to the rapid pace of change. "Digital" includes all hardware/software, not exclusively computers, in a converged digital world. They are the catalyst responsible for creating the problem as well as the victim. Thus, the further we progress in developing stores of knowledge to be accessible from anywhere by anyone on a digital network, the more transient and vulnerable to digital amnesia the knowledge becomes.
Several organizations have studied the phenomenon from different approaches across several disciplines. Francine Berman, the Director of the San Diego Supercomputer center, takes a data-centric approach. The Library of Congress has a website devoted to the implications from the point of view as archivist. Alexander Stille makes observation based on impact to culture and society. The Long Now Foundation makes observations from critical point of view directed at society's inability to look past the present.

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