One has to wonder...

[devino246]

In the last few years Ive developed a bit of an interest in genealogy/"ye olden tymes". Ive looked through photo albums 5 times my age, books that predate the civil war, heard stories about family antiques, etc. With the disuse of physical record keeping, tangible pictures, and quality home goods, I cant help but to wonder what will become of the memories of today.

With film pictures, you had a solid object that could be packed away in an attic and left for years. With digital media becoming king, years worth of pictures are stored on hard drives, easily lost in the event of a crashed drive or invasive virus.

Modern furniture is a disposable, consumable item. MDF under wood vernier means when it wears, theres no refinishing it. An old table could be refinished dozens of times, providing decades, even centuries of use.

While many of our parents grew up in the house in which our grandparents currently reside, nearly 3/4 of the US population moves an average of once every 5 years.

Anyone have any thoughts?

 

[CaptCanadia]

I think we'll always be remembered. We do have tangible items that are stored such as pictures and a LOT of video. A group of people on YouTube made a documentary of modern life. It was called Life In a Day I believe and they got clips from millions of people and made it into a single video just from that one day. Also, eras aren't just remembered by stuff such as pictures and videos, I think our time will be remembered as a time of sadness considering the massive debts and wars going on. Every decade has its thing, the 70's being remembered for the oil crisis and disco and hippies and so on; the 80's being an era for Rock n' Roll and fashion and 90's being remembered for a lot of new technologies that changed our world. I think we'll have our place in time.

 

[machinist@large]

I'm a history buff myself; I can see where you are going with this and what you mean. The best thing you can do, is back up your info on CD. Once copied, you won't have to worry about the hard drive crashing. But it's still not a permanent fix. If not stored properly, even CD's start to degrade/break down after 25-30 years. Then you also have to worry about formats changing with time. Just because the disk is OK won't mean a thing if you don't have any thing that can read it. I guess we'll have to see how it goes.

Another thing that librarians and historians are worried about is today's books. Around the turn of the last century, most books and news papers were started to be printed on acid base paper because it was a lot cheaper than the acid free process used before. News papers from the 1850's are still readable; ones from the 1940's are crumbling because of the acid in the paper. It can be treated to neutralize it, but it not cheap. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

[devino246]

Fortunately, the first half of my life was photographed with 35mm. We've got boxes of pics. I still remember the first digital camera my dad got. Like $400 brick, 1.3mp. I will be making a scrapbook of the family farm as it stands. The old stable is slowly falling apart, and Id like future generations to see what it was like.

Speaking of old things: Post Your Antiques