{"id":2511,"date":"2015-02-19T04:53:04","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T04:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/?p=2511"},"modified":"2022-06-23T07:43:48","modified_gmt":"2022-06-23T07:43:48","slug":"google-executive-and-co-founder-of-the-internet-vint-cerf-says-you-need-to-start-printing-everything-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/google-executive-and-co-founder-of-the-internet-vint-cerf-says-you-need-to-start-printing-everything-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Google executive and co-founder of the internet Vint Cerf says you need to start printing everything out"},"content":{"rendered":"

IN a new article,<\/strong>\u00a0a senior Google executive has suggested that the increasing practice of recording information only in digital form could turn the 21st century into a new dark age, which future historians will struggle to make sense of, because of the lack of written records. The executive, Vint Cerf, is encouraging us to put our information into written form. Historians have struggled to come to grips with the period of history after the demise of the Roman Empire because of the lack of written records. The period is widely known as the Dark Ages, but there are those, such as historian Rodney Stark, who say this period was not dark at all. Naturally we at Kainos Print thoroughly endorse Cerf’s comments and stand ready to offer our assistance to anyone moved to take his advice.<\/p>\n

Here is the article, which can be read in full\u00a0here<\/a><\/p>\n

DIGITAL technology could turn the 21st century into a new dark age lost to history, a leading internet pioneer has warned.<\/strong>
\nAs operating systems and software get upgraded, documents and images stored using older technology are becoming increasingly inaccessible, said Dr Vinton \u201cVint\u201d Cerf, vice-president of Google. In centuries to come, historians looking back on the present era could be confronted by a digital desert comparable with the dark ages \u2014 the post-Roman period in Western Europe about which relatively little is known because of the scarcity of written records.<\/p>\n

Dr Cerf, who also has the title of chief internet evangelist at Google, said: \u201cIf we\u2019re thinking 1000 years, 3000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.
\n\u201cThe 22nd century and future centuries after that will wonder about us but they\u2019ll have great difficulty knowing much because so much of what we\u2019ve left behind may be bits that are uninterpretable.\u201d He urged people to think about printing out their treasured photos and not rely on storing them as memory files.<\/p>\n

Preserving the present … Cerf, pictured left, says future civilisations will wonder about us, but they\u2019ll have great difficulty knowing much.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our zeal to get excited about digitising, we digitise photographs thinking it\u2019s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out.\u201d Dr Cerf was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Silicon Valley capital, San Jose, California.<\/p>\n

To illustrate his point, he referred to an \u201camazing book\u201d by American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

Her material was obtained by scouring libraries for copies of written correspondence between Lincoln and the people around him. Dr Cerf said: \u201cLet us imagine that there\u2019s a 22nd-century Doris Kearns Goodwin and she decides to write about the beginning of the 21st century and seeks to reproduce the conversations of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe discovers that there\u2019s an awful lot of digital content that either has evaporated because nobody saved it, or it\u2019s around but it\u2019s not interpretable because it was created by software that\u2019s 100 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem also had serious implications for the storage of legal documents needed to be kept for long periods, he said. One possible solution was what he called \u201cdigital vellum\u201d, a concept now being explored by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n

This involved taking a digital \u201csnapshot\u201d at the time an item is stored of all the processes needed to reproduce it at a later date, including the software and operating system.<\/p>\n

The snapshot could then be used to reproduce the game, picture file or spread sheet, on a \u201cmodern\u201d computer, perhaps centuries from now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IN a new article,\u00a0a senior Google executive has suggested that the increasing practice of recording information only in digital form could turn the 21st century into a new dark age, which future historians will struggle to make sense of, because of the lack of written records. The executive, Vint Cerf, is encouraging us to put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,3,4,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-book-printing","category-booklet-printing","category-self-publishing","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2511"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3432,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions\/3432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}