Lost Blogs And Data, Lost History

The phenomenon of lost blogs highlights a problem that’s becoming apparent with digital data collection in general. More and more details of people’s private lives are ending up online, whether they are posted in a personal blog, a social network, or even a site for uploading public photos. It’s well-known among data management professionals that it only takes three generations of new technology before they lose the ability to read anything from four technological generations ago.

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?

Historians can still study cuneiform tablets and reconstruct the history of Babylon, or read Egyptian tomb records and learn what happened in that country 4000 years ago. And because of personally written journals and accounts, America’s founding history is well known. But today’s history may be lost as technology changes. Alter the blogging software of a few sites just enough over the next 20 years, and the news, analysis and personal reflections of millions of people will be gone. A blog may correspond to the papers of older historical figures, but the technology makes it less easy to preserve.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

Changes in technology keep pushing people forward as they switch to new formats and storage methods. Some do recognize how expensive it is to upgrade every digital record to the new technologies, and therefore resign themselves to lost data. Even as they delete their own email they may be erasing some important documents that could have cast light on today’s historical climate. What will happen if blogging software changes so much in coming decades that even earlier blogs full of news analysis and information become unreadable? The loss of digital data, with no backups in longer-lasting paper form, could have a devastating effect on the future historical understanding of this century.

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