I had this really bizarre dream the other night.
For those of you that don’t know much about my education you should at least know that I am a Science, Technology and Society major at ASU. I study technology and the way it affects society. This semester (my last- woo hoo!) I have been studying a lot of history of technology and the transfer of technology through social changes. A lot of basic concepts of things that are then adapted to meet the needs of a specific area. Most of my books have started with plows then moved to looms and more sophisticated things like locomotives and bridges. It’s really amazing to see how al of the world worked before information technology even existed.
When I tell people that I am a STS major they immediately conclude that it all has to do with information technology and computers. Although that is the path I have written most of my papers about I haven’t excluded other technologies that have played an important role in other things. One thing I love reading about is the discovery of new artifacts and ancient things left behind that tells us how people lived and functioned. So, now back to my dream…
I dreamt that I was living far, far in the future and working as a historian of some sort. My team discovered a basement full of small, plastic square things that contained a black circle of something in the center. We had no idea what they were or what to do with them and every time we thought we knew something it failed to give us any additional information. This sent my team into a mass panic because there was such a large gap of human history that no one knew anything about. Can you guess what my dream was about? After studying so much about artifacts I often wonder if hundreds of years down the road we will be able to look back at this digital age and even knew it existed. Most of the things from my childhood are saved on a floppy disk. This generation is lucky enough to have CDs and external hard drives. What happens if the technology available to retrieve this information no longer exists in 20 years? I don’t even own a computer with a disk drive anymore! I have a MacBook with a CD drive to look at all of my pictures my family sends me but even my CD drive has malfunctioned. I am critical of digital storage and printing pictures from my HP deskjet printer. Will those things last as long as the gelatin silver process did? I think not.
I wish I could be around to see what happens with all of our digital artifacts. I would think it would be rather interesting to see the future decipher the digital dark ages we are in the process of creating.
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