As technology marches forward, do we run the risk of entering a digital dark age or “forgotten century,” as Google vice-president, Vint Cerf, warned at a conference in San Jose, California, last week. With so much emphasis and money put on developing new, better, faster software and hardware and so little put on managing all the information stored in what we used last year, Cerf has a valid point.

Creating content is one thing. Managing it is another.

The Guardian’s Feb. 13 story says:

Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.

Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.

“When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said.

“We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.

To read the complete story, click here.