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The Digital Gap

Be scared. At present, our digital information is doomed. I attended
the Press Day at the Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity
(http://www.ahip.getty.edu/timeandbits/intro.html) conference at the
Getty Institute on February 10, 1998. The Getty sponsored the
meeting so that a challenge can be raised to the uncritical acceptance
of digital technology. There was a screening of Into the Future
which was followed by a panel discussion with some of the meeting
attendees.

Into the Future premiered on PBS last month. Its filmmaker, Terry
Saunders, presented the film. His first film concerning the loss of
the human record was Slow Fires. When it premiered ten years ago,
it brought public awareness to the need for microfilming of the
rapidly decomposing libraries filled with acid-paper. It helped raise
over $400 million towards book preservation. In making Into the
Future, he hoped to raise a flag at the dire need to address the
imminent loss of our digital human record. As he put together the
film and spoke of its focus to people, the reaction was one of
puzzlement. This is not an issue which the general population has
considered. People would think a plan for preservation was built
into technology, but nobody talks about it in the popular press: e.g.
Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and Nicholas Negroponte's Being
Digital. Saunders claims these authors only focus on the information
age without regard for the past.

The panelists at the discussion:

Steward Brand - Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of
the Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, and author of
book on the future

Doug Carlston - Cofounder and CEO of Broderbund Software

Brian Eno - Digital Musician, music producer and artist

Danny Hillis - VP of R & D, the Walt Disney Company, a Disney
Fellow and cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation

Brewster Kahle - Inventor and found of Wide Area Information
Servers, Inc. [WAIS} and Founder of the Internet Archive

Kevin Kelly - Executive Editor, Wired and author of Out of Control

Peter Lyman - University Librarian, and professor in the School of
Information  Management & Systems at UCBerkeley

Howard Besser - Digital archiving specialist, Adjunct Associate
Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management &
Systems

Margaret MacLean - Special Initiatives, Getty Conservation Institute

Ben Davis - Program Manager, Communications, Getty Information
Institute

The meeting included other people who were not present at the
discussion: Jaron Lanier, John Heilemann, Paul Saffo.

The emerging theme of the meeting was that the consciousness of
the public must be raised. The Digital Gap is here, we have lost and
are losing much our digital legacy. Where the life of a Web page is
only 70 days, our constantly evolving technology dooms us to an
exponentially growing loss. The possibility exists, for the first time
in recorded history, that no trace of information will be retrievable
from a segment of our era.

The panel consensus attempted to devise a means and a method for
digital information preservation. The panel offered a small scale
solution. Doug Carlston offered the idea of the Rosetta Stone vs. a
Marathon. Make 1000 great books available for free on the web and
also, at the same time, etch the same books into a media which will
suffer little deterioration over time. This serves to counterbalance a
widely disseminated version against a stable copy of the information
from which later copies can always be compared.

This is a beginning. Peter Lyman stressed, this is the first time since
the 18th century new formats of information have emerged. His
examples included: visualization, medical imaging, the Web and data
collection. Society as a whole must rethink how we use, retrieve and
store these new formats. Do you store just the bits? What about the
relationships, the cultural context which add meaning to
information? This was not addressed in any real form. The techies
ruled the meeting, and the voice of cultural information retention
was only addressed in Brian Eno's comments. The example he gave
was that of an image of Malevich's White on White (1918)
(http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Malevik.html) going
digital.  It will just look like a white square projected. It must retain
its cultural resonance. The really hard thing in digital preservation is
creating the meta languages/data which can be imbedded in the
"bits."

Two comments stood out. Danny Hillis' description of technology:

***  "Technology is stuff that doesn't work. Digital is technology - but it
is so cool that we're using it before it works"

***  Brian Eno's acceptance of our loss of information. The realization
that throughout history some information is always disappearing.
"Forgetting," he said, "is as important as remembering"


Adina Lerner
Walt Disney Archives