Preparing for the future

In our reading this week Cohen and Rosenzweig begin to speculate about the future of technology, in particular how an historian is supposed to ensure that the work done today will be accessible tomorrow. In their own words they say this: “Technological change has indeed become a troubling constant in our world, and one that greatly erodes the reliability and durability of the data and documents on which we rely as both historians and modern human beings. It is already difficult to open WordStar documents from the 1980’s or even many WordPerfect documents from the 1990’s” (pg. 243)

Obsolete

Of course I’m not savvy enough to know how to prevent the loss of historical information due to new developments in technology, although I’d like to be. To go along with the examples of the authors, I can’t help but think of my old 3.5 inch floppy disk that used to store some of my old college work way back when—about 9 years ago. How would I go about retrieving that information? (assuming I could actually find the floppy disk in the first place). Certainly at the present moment there are probably ways of going about this, but I can see what the authors are getting at. As we look farther down the road, my naïve hope is that new technology will be able to solve these sorts of historical dilemmas.

Underlying much of this worry is the fact that technology grows exponentially. Cohen and Rosenzweig give us an example of this phenomenon: “At Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, one terabyte of storage cost roughly $5 million; today you can purchase the same amount of digital space for $500” (pg. 227)  Since Digital History was written the price has gone down even further to about $100.

How did they play angry birds on these old supercomputers?

The prolific growth of technology was noticed at least by 1965 with the introduction of ‘Moore’s Law,’ and is championed today by techno-prophets like Ray Kurzweil who reminds us that our smartphones are “several billion times more powerful per dollar” than the supercomputers of the 1960’s and “100,000 times smaller.”  Essentially this exponential growth is due to the fact that we can use today’s best computers to make even better computers tomorrow, and in turn use tomorrow’s computers to make something even more powerful for the next day, and so on.

Whoa...

In regards to our relationship with technology, with this sort of information, it makes me think that the greatest attribute a 21^st century historian can have is the ability to adapt. Aside from that I still don’t know how we can possibly prepare for such an uncertain future.