Will We Enter a Digital Dark Age?

One of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Internet, Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols), warns that most of the data being saved today in the cloud, USB drives, hard drives, discs, etc. will be inaccessible in 100 years due to advanced technology of the 22nd century making today’s technology obsolete. The 21st century will become a dark age due to all the data being lost.

Vint Cerf Warns of Digital Dark Age

Certainly a lot of data was lost during the transition from 3.5 inch floppies to CD-ROMs, and, yes, I know this from personal experience. But many of us learned that lesson and have become better stewards of our digital files, regularly backing them up and transitioning them from one new technology to the next. Surely some data will be lost along the way like a crumbling cookie, but it will be mostly the careless and ill-planned who will lose their digital past. Yes, technology available 100 years from now will be completely unusable with today’s ports and drives, but most of us who are responsible will make the necessary transfers along the way.

As for public data on the web, the Way Back Machine at Archive.org already copies and stores most well-known websites today. Researchers in the 22nd century will be able to see how Yahoo! looked in 1996 until its inevitable demise this century. On the marco level, so much is being archived that little will be lost. On the micro level, many individuals will lose their digital history but that will be their own fault for not preserving their past. And, in a sense, this is no different as it has ever been with failure to store film photographs and/or paintings in cool places and out of direct sunlight. The method of preservation changes, but ultimately it’s the human will and foresight that determines whether it will be saved for posterity.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150218_Vint-Cerf-Warns-of-Digital-Dark-Age.htm

Advertisements as Content on the Front Page of Forbes Magazine

We know the slogan of Forbes magazine is that it’s a capitalist tool, but putting advertisements disguised as content on the cover might be taking that concept a bit too far:

Ads, Editorial, It’s All #Content

Print magazines are desperate to generate revenue any way they can as ad dollars from agencies and companies increasingly chase new media outlets, but disguising an ad as content is a bridge that no large, mainstream media outlet has crossed before. Readers should be able to delineate clearly the difference between an ad and content. The latter is generally perused, while the former is scanned. The utility of a magazine decreases when the two are conflated as it confuses the reader. Perhaps this is a just a death knell for Forbes magazine. Though I never regularly read Forbes, it’s always had a nice nostalgic note for me by cracking the fabrications of Stephen Glass the fabulist at the New Republic in the late 1990s. Jukt Mirconics forever!

The death of print magazines is sad as it is a print medium I still enjoy reading. I like the convenience of flipping through the pages of a magazine as paper/ink than as pixels/slides on an iPad screen, or as a bunch of links on a website. But if print magazine’s path to survival includes ads disguised as content, then you can count me out.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150217_ads-as-content-on-forbes-magazine-front-page.htm