Viewing digital data from an historical perspective, the prospect of lost history looms as a very real threat. It may not seem that the deletion or loss of a few personal blogs could have that much of an effect, but the phenomenon is a symptom of something larger. Professionals in data management know too well that as a technology develops through four generations, the data created with the methods of the first generation finally becomes unreadable. This has implications for everything from blogs to photos hosted on websites to other kinds of records.

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?

On a large scale, historians worry that whole chunks of modern history are being lost. People can still read cuneiform tablets or ancient Egyptian records, and America’s founding history is well understood because the participants kept personal journals, wrote extensive and detailed letters, and compiled personal accounts of the events. Is a blog an historical document of the same kind? If blogging software changes significantly two decades from now, will all the news, analysis, and personal reflections that blogs once contained vanish, leaving this historical epoch a complete blank?

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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