Lost Blogs And Data, Lost History

As new blogs are created, older blogs continually disappear or are lost, and unease grows about the vanishing of personal records. Professional data management studies have shown that by the time new technologies have gone through four generations, information created with the methods of the first generation becomes unreadable. This means that somebody's blog, or even public photos stored on a website, could disappear, leaving an historical gap in the public record where that person used to be.

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?

Ironically, ancient records in archaic formats may be longer-lasting than digital data that can easily be lost. Historians can reconstruct Babylonian history from cuneiform tablets, and Egyptian history from hieroglyphs on monuments. Even America's early history will remain known because it was written on paper, in letters, personal accounts and other documents. But if the software for blogging changes drastically in the next few decades, millions of blogs containing accounts and analysis of today's history could become unreadable. Blogs are less easily preserved than a clay tablet or even a paper book.

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.

As people continue to embrace new technologies and recognize the expense of constantly upgrading their data into the new formats, many resign themselves to lost records. Both the ordinary person as well as news makers and analysts who publish weblogs may eventually vanish from the digital record. Even just deleting one's own email could erase documents that might have helped future historians understand the events of this time period. This could be a devastating loss.