The "Loss of History" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Looking through my 40 plus CDs of vacation photographs to find a particular image that I know I have, but can't quite remember where I filed it.  All my CDs are stored in a leather covered notebook for safe keeping.  Many of them I have used in stories I have written, but very few of them have I ever made prints of during the 15 years that Carol and I have been traveling.  Just don't do it that way anymore.  Quite different than when my parents traveled and filled photo albums with 3"x5", 4"x6" or even Polaroid photos of their travels.  

Polaroid camera from my mom and dad.

I actually have a few of those albums stored in a second floor closet.  Also stored in the closet are three large plastic tubs of photos taken during the first 65 or so years of my life as well as photos taken of Carol's early years.  While our children were growing up I took an unbelievable amount of photos.  Many were black and white photos that I made myself in my basement darkroom or at the high school darkroom where I taught photography.  Don't do any of that anymore and I suspect very few other people do that either with the advent of affordable digital photography about 15 years ago.  I was talking to my niece's husband who also files many digital images of his family, asking him about my storage method of my digital photographs.  He advised me to back them up with an auxiliary hard drive, since the life expectancy of a CD with photos on it is slightly over 10 years.  Wow!!  I have hard copy photos from when I was born 70 years ago and now he's telling me I better do something about my CDs or my photos from 15 years ago are in jeopardy.  What's going to happen to an entire generation or two of people who have never taken anything but digital photographs.  They might never be able to view photos of their youth or their children if they forget to backe up their CDs and the CDs disintegrate.  Same goes for the written word.  Who writes letters anymore?  I have letters that my dad wrote to his mom almost 100 years ago.  Physical letters you can hold in your hand.  What's going to happen to all the emails that you write to your mom or dad?  Will they be lost in space, never able to be shared with anyone ever again?  The digital world is wonderful, but we live in a time when history may not survive.  If someone decided to create a section in a museum dedicated to the history of 1995-2015, where will they get the photos and written memoirs?  And, how about this story that you are now reading.  I only have a copy of it on my computer, the same as you do.  These are stories of my life.  If this blogger website decides to close, where will my stories be?  Lost in space!  Tell you what, I have decided to print out all my stories as hard copy on acid free paper so my children, grandchildren and their children can share them for years to come.  And, I plan to buy a desktop hard drive to back up all those photos I have on CDs.  Here's hoping that the hard drive will be able to be plugged into the computers of 50 years from now.  Or will it be like the box of VCRs that I have that I can't look at anymore, since my VCR was thrown out.  Isn't planned obsolescence wonderful?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.