Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and B) that we will have the ability to retrieve and display "ancient" file formats even if those selfies survive on disk?
I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
File formats in general are fairly straightforward at the bit level. Languages would be a larger issue except they are also stagnating with slower drift over time as population sizes increase.
On top of that we are still producing vast amounts of written material that is likely to survive. Net result future historians are going to have far more to work with than current ones do.
PS: Remember even 1 in 1,000,000 files would still add up to a lot of information. That said, encryption is likely to be a larger issue.
Imagine some future archaelogist making the first discovery of the shell of a old floppy disk. Without context, this would probably become the equivalent of "black ceremonial item".
Existing libraries already have trouble with low-quality books and film that doesn’t survive very well. Only the most important artifacts tend to be copied to archival-quality material.
Why would digital artifacts be any different? And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff? Look at how much bitrot there is on most web pages after just 10 or 20 years. Even setting aside physical bitrot, there’s plenty of semantic data loss that nobody really cares enough about to fix.
Finally, despite all the above, let’s say we do come up with a cheap and practical way to store digital data for very long periods of time. Unless it’s very compact, it will use an appreciable amount of energy and material resources to store stuff. Which tiny fraction of the massive tidal wave of digital content should be archived, and who gets to decide?
To my understanding there are institutions including the library of congress whose main purpose is preserving information. Not all information, of course.
Yes, it's much easier to learn a foreign script than to decipher a forgotten disk format where bytes are nanometers in size - but given the vast utility computing devices provide us, we need to fall pretty deep and far from where the current historical development is taking us to forget computational devices as a civilization entirely.
If we have academia - and there is very little reason to think we won't - I'm sure there will be departments of digital information preservation who specialize in extracting cat videos (and probably digital physical simulacrums of the cutest cats) from the vast array of storage material our generation and the next will store.
The question is this: At which point will youtube seize to exist? If it won't there is no reason to think it cannot forward the data it stores to the future millenia. I mean, catholic church is over a millenia old with archives stretching as far. Is there some reason (barring some hollywoodesque global calamity) youtube could not reach the same age?
Those problems could certainly be avoided or worked around if YT takes sufficient care, but maybe they won’t have the right incentives to care continuously for the next 1000 years. I think it’s a much harder challenge than preserving paper and vellum artifacts.
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).
I wonder how much longer the symbol will be in use.
Even the Old Testament (specifically the book of Joshua) makes reference to texts which are now lost and you'd think somebody would have cared to preserve those.
And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists.
It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found.
Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago.
The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence].
My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)
Books and printed photos have survived so well because they do not have dependencies or require maintenance to be accessible to future generations.
Imagine if every book had a special bookstand that you needed to have to make the words appear. And books from different years or different countries use different bookstands. Sometimes a new edition of the book will be released, but it needs a new bookstand that can show this new version of the book.
A large number of archivists and librarians (no, they're not the same job) just laughed uproariously.
They've survived so well because there's multiple copies of them. The higher the number of copies, the greater the chances that something will survive. And we live in an era of contents reproduced millions of times in a fully automated way, without any effort and in negligible time. Even if the constant copy and distribution of material over the internet and in data centers should cease at some point in the future, just think of all the copies of books and movies and pictures that are presently sitting in dusty hard drives inside dead laptops or at the back of some drawer.
thanks to projects like archive.org, we are in one of the best documented, most survivable ages of human civilisation. digital data can be copied as many times as you like without degradation, so it won’t be “ravaged by time” like ancient inks and paints.
short of a major worldwide event like a global return to the ages of book burning (though even then there will likely be hobbyists that go against the grain and store TB of data for the future), i can see wikipedia, and huge parts of our current society immaculately preserved.
when you have access like that, reading and displaying our ancient formats won’t be that big of an issue for someone who makes it their life’s work to research and write the text “decoding the 21st century facebook”.
That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.
The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper.
The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light).
None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand.
Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.
I assume all data would be deleted, unless something like one of those 'crusader' archive teams helped back up everything before it went down, however here it seems unlikely to happen because I doubt everyone's data could be given to an archive team for privacy reasons. It's an interesting problem.