‘Digital Dark Age’ May Doom Some Data

Science Daily brings us “news” of the impend­ing dig­i­tal dark age, cour­tesy of Jerome McDonough at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I write this with some sar­casm because the Digital Dark Age is not exactly news; peo­ple have been spec­u­lat­ing about it for years, prob­a­bly ever since some guy real­ized that he needed some­thing off a 5.25-inch floppy drive in 1999.

But this para­graph from the story really caught my eye:

“E-mail is a clas­sic exam­ple of that,” he said. “It runs both the mod­ern busi­ness world and gov­ern­ment. If that infor­ma­tion is lost, you’ve lost the archive of what has actu­ally hap­pened in the mod­ern world. We’ve seen a cou­ple of exam­ples of this so far.” (From ‘Digital Dark Age’ May Doom Some Data)

It made me dream up some kind of post-apocalyptic science-fiction-fantasy story, in which peo­ple have lost all mod­ern knowl­edge because it was all recorded on com­puter files, com­puter that don’t work after the world-ending event.

It’s just a shade of a story for now; per­haps more will come later.