09-13-2012, 10:05 PM
30 or 40 years from now, there will be no shoeboxes to go through, discovering odd faded photos, outtakes. It's not even clear that photos and snapshots being taken now, by average folks, will be successfully preserved by their guardians.
I realize uploading to websites is an avenue that offers some protection, but it also has a kind of impermanence or perishability, as the sites and agreements shift and companies come and go. A website, cloud service, social media site, or hosting company is not the same thing as as shoebox. It likes to tell customers that it is, it's like a safe convenient storage locker, but it's not like a box in your mom's basement, which can be neglected for 20 years and found again. Mom's house doesn't have a TOS agreement, or contract, or password. A box with a lid on it, or old photo albums, aren't 'data storage', they're physical things.
This could be said for a lot of digital consumer content, which is in its most elementary state, just data. Before, a photograph was a photograph. Now it's data. How well data is or isn't preserved depends on a lot of factors, the user's habits, the services used, the storage methods.
I've been doing consumer-level digital photography for about 10 years (or however long, as soon as digital cameras became affordable and abundant) and I've already had photos wiped out by disasters (fire, but that kind of event takes non-digital photos too) and data losses, failed hard drives, etc. And since we can all delete photos we don't like, erase them, a certain kind of accidental preservation of personal images that hobbyists, archivists, artists, and historians prize will also be missing, when people in the future look at the past.
Not saying this is automatically a bad thing. And truth is, I'm not overly sentimental about printed snapshots or photo albums. Digital photography has more virtues than drawbacks.
But rediscovering a hidden trove of vacation photo outtakes (of your high school sweetheart, topless, or something) from 25 years ago, on a thumb drive (will it even load on anything?) will never be the quite as dramatic finding them in a shoebox in a basement.
I realize uploading to websites is an avenue that offers some protection, but it also has a kind of impermanence or perishability, as the sites and agreements shift and companies come and go. A website, cloud service, social media site, or hosting company is not the same thing as as shoebox. It likes to tell customers that it is, it's like a safe convenient storage locker, but it's not like a box in your mom's basement, which can be neglected for 20 years and found again. Mom's house doesn't have a TOS agreement, or contract, or password. A box with a lid on it, or old photo albums, aren't 'data storage', they're physical things.
This could be said for a lot of digital consumer content, which is in its most elementary state, just data. Before, a photograph was a photograph. Now it's data. How well data is or isn't preserved depends on a lot of factors, the user's habits, the services used, the storage methods.
I've been doing consumer-level digital photography for about 10 years (or however long, as soon as digital cameras became affordable and abundant) and I've already had photos wiped out by disasters (fire, but that kind of event takes non-digital photos too) and data losses, failed hard drives, etc. And since we can all delete photos we don't like, erase them, a certain kind of accidental preservation of personal images that hobbyists, archivists, artists, and historians prize will also be missing, when people in the future look at the past.
Not saying this is automatically a bad thing. And truth is, I'm not overly sentimental about printed snapshots or photo albums. Digital photography has more virtues than drawbacks.
But rediscovering a hidden trove of vacation photo outtakes (of your high school sweetheart, topless, or something) from 25 years ago, on a thumb drive (will it even load on anything?) will never be the quite as dramatic finding them in a shoebox in a basement.