You know, a photo? Taken on film, developed with chemicals and printed on photo paper? One of those.

I haven’t seen an in-the-flesh photo for a while but seeing the gorgeous young family in print reminded me of finding a box full of old, faded B & W and sepia ancestral photos in my dad’s closet when he passed on. There was a picture of my grandfather who I had never met. I sat for a few moments looking at the tenuous connection with my unknown past and thanked my father’s obsession with photography that brought it down through the ages to my hands.

As much as I love the convenience and power of digital photography I’m pretty certain that my  grandchildren aren’t going to stumble across a box full of 50 year old backup hard drives and be able to view my photo collection.

Digital media is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it democratizes the process of creating and sharing pictures, videos and recordings in a way that no previous technology was able to achieve. On the other it has made that media a thing of the moment: snapped with a cellphone, shared with the press of a button and quickly buried beneath the storm of bite sized status updates and “So-and-so found a lost sheep on his Farmville Farm and needs someone to take care of it!” announcements in the facebook news feed.

We have way more media than ever before and yet hardly any of it will outlive the delivery medium de jour. I almost think that future historians will look back at this “digital revolution” as a kind of dark age from which very little material artwork of enduring quality emerged. A brief high of media productivity that leaves little to no trace in the historical record.

“My computer crashed and won’t start! Can you save the pictures on the hard drive?”

That’s a common plea for help for me as a freelance computer technician. In most cases the answer is yes, but it strikes me that digital media is so fragile, so ephemeral. Its also dependent on a variety of formats: the physical media format; the hardware sockets, drivers and OS to read that format; the logical format the media is stored as, and the software to interpret it.

A perfect example is the box full of 3.5″ floppy drives we found while cleaning out our deep storage in the garage a few months back. Even if the old disks still worked do you still have a floppy drive around anywhere? Does anyone you know? If you did  find one… would it be worth the time and effort to go through the slow buzz, pop and rattle of reading each weary disk and copying the old data to an new medium? And what’s this? Wordperfect files?! That was a DOS program! What do I do with that?

An even less extreme example: I have hundreds of gigabytes of photos, videos and multitrack recording session files archived on hard drives. IDE hard drives. All of our computers use SATA drives, as do all of our currently connected external drive bays. I have one IDE drive bay that still works. I think. I haven’t hooked up for a while.

The right thing to do, I suppose, is to hook that thing up and transfer the data from the 8 or 9 IDE drives I have (most under 300GB) and transfer them all to one of the 2 terrabyte drives I have currently in use. Then I can throw away the 10 pounds or so of old steel, silicon and magnetic media in obsolete small drives. One of them is even an 8.5GB drive. I have several USB flash drives larger than that.

In doing so I’d be following the great tradition of the monks living the Dark Age monasteries who would painstakingly copy each book in the library by hand to preserve them from the inevitable ravages of time. These days the process is faster and easier but also has to be done every other year or so instead of every other lifetime or so. And if that process ever stops for a gap of 10-15 years at most that media will quickly fade into obsolescence.

Regardless of what ancestral treasures that box of hard drives once held, my grandchildren will have no choice but to just throw them away. We may well be that last generation to commonly find a box full of old family photos and the first generation since the dawn of photography not to be found in them.

In the grand scheme of things this isn’t really a big deal. Prior to the advent of home photography only those people rich enough to commission the painting of a portrait had much hope of their image outliving them. All the same I think its wise to recognize how ephemeral and tenuous the “information age” might be.

And yet over the years I have had a variety of thoughts and experiences that I’ve felt would make interesting reading on a blog. Since I have a website already I might as well use it as a blog. And so… here’s a blog. You can, no doubt, so the flawless logic in my reasoning.

And for my first blog entry… have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the word “blog?” There is just nothing graceful about the word. Too close to slog, flog and grog. For some reason I always think of “blog” as referring to writing that unrefined and tedious by its very nature.

But I highly respect the artform at a whole. There are some excellent and well thought out blogs to be had these days. With any luck this will eventually be numbered among their company.