Buổi 27: Reading – Bài Academic dài, nhiều dạng câu hỏi, tính giờ 20 phút (nguy cơ “thời kỳ tối tăm số”)

Will the digital age be forgotten?

(Bài đọc tự viết; nội dung ở mức phổ thông, không có số liệu thật.)

A Some letters, contracts and diaries written on paper have survived for many centuries, often in conditions that were far from ideal. It is a sobering thought that much of what is created today may not last a fraction of that time. The documents, photographs and messages that record our lives are now overwhelmingly digital, and digital information, for all its convenience, is in some respects remarkably fragile.

B The most obvious threat is technical obsolescence. A file is useful only as long as there is hardware that can read it and software that can interpret it. Storage formats that were standard a generation ago can now be difficult to open without specialist equipment, and programs written for older operating systems may simply refuse to run. The information has not been destroyed, but it has become, in practice, unreadable.

C A second, subtler problem affects the web. Pages are moved, renamed or deleted every day, and the links that once pointed to them lead nowhere. This phenomenon, sometimes called link rot, matters well beyond inconvenience. Academic articles, legal decisions and news reports increasingly cite online sources, and when those sources vanish, the chain of evidence on which later readers depend is broken.

D Archivists have developed two main responses to obsolescence. The first, migration, involves converting files into newer formats before the old ones become unreadable. It is relatively straightforward, but each conversion risks losing some features of the original – a document’s layout, perhaps, or the behaviour of an interactive program. The second, emulation, takes the opposite approach: rather than changing the file, it recreates the original environment in software, so that the file can be experienced as it was. Emulation preserves more, but it demands considerable expertise and must itself be maintained as technology changes.

E Even if every technical problem were solved, a further question would remain: what should be kept? The quantity of digital material produced each day is so vast that no institution could hope to preserve it all. Archivists must therefore select, and selection is never neutral. Decisions about what is significant inevitably reflect the priorities of those who make them, and material produced by marginal groups has historically been among the first to be lost.

F The final difficulty is perhaps the least discussed. A large share of contemporary social life takes place on commercial platforms, whose primary obligations are to their owners and users rather than to future historians. When a platform closes or changes its policies, years of conversations and images can disappear. In many countries, national archives have no automatic right to copy such material, and the companies concerned are under no obligation to offer it.

G None of this means that a “digital dark age” – a period about which future generations know almost nothing – is inevitable. Libraries, archives and volunteer projects are already preserving a great deal. But it does mean that preservation will not happen by itself. Paper often survived through neglect; digital records will survive only through deliberate choices, made now, about what to keep, how, and by whom.