Viewing digital data from an historical perspective, the prospect of lost history looms as a very real threat. It may not seem that the deletion or loss of a few personal blogs could have that much of an effect, but the phenomenon is a symptom of something larger. Professionals in data management know too well that as a technology develops through four generations, the data created with the methods of the first generation finally becomes unreadable. This has implications for everything from blogs to photos hosted on websites to other kinds of records.

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?

Historians can still study cuneiform tablets and reconstruct the history of Babylon, or read Egyptian tomb records and learn what happened in that country 4000 years ago. And because of personally written journals and accounts, America’s founding history is well known. But today’s history may be lost as technology changes. Alter the blogging software of a few sites just enough over the next 20 years, and the news, analysis and personal reflections of millions of people will be gone. A blog may correspond to the papers of older historical figures, but the technology makes it less easy to preserve.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

As people continue to embrace new technologies and recognize the expense of constantly upgrading their data into the new formats, many resign themselves to lost records. Both the ordinary person as well as news makers and analysts who publish weblogs may eventually vanish from the digital record. Even just deleting one’s own email could erase documents that might have helped future historians understand the events of this time period. This could be a devastating loss.

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