What do you call spring-cleaning in the middle of November? And why should it be a seasonal huff and puff? After all, we don’t really have a spring (or an autumn, for that matter), but rather, a quick no-clutch change of gears from summer to winter. The change is so quick that we’re usually caught with our short pants on in the middle of a thunderstorm.
I am, of course, taking the long way home here, circling the dead zone like a vegan vulture, hoping that someone else will drop and beak the trash away. And then, when the wife returns home and sees a clean spare room, we can live happily ever after. Except that if she asks me whether I threw away the empty shoeboxes, mismatched flip-flops, gap-toothed keyboards and a decade of diaries, I will have to lie and tell her that no, it wasn’t the friendly vulture – I did it.
Which in the end, turns out to be the truth. Because after an hour of staring at the walls and wondering how a few years of disposing of my income have turned a spare room into what looks like a mismanaged civic amenity site, I dig in. One weekend later, I’m still digging in. In the end, I throw away so much stuff that one of the neighbours asks me whether I’m moving out.
And now, the spare room is really spare. I’ve thrown away all the useless (and some of the useful, by mistake) items on which time has stamped its expiry date. Except for a stack of video cassette tapes, which I didn’t have the heart to bin because they’re personal ones, recorded during colour-bleached family outings. I will never watch them again, because I don’t have a VHS player. And I probably won’t bother to digitise them. In the end, only the fading labels will offer a glimpse of the past: party 1992, holiday in Italy 1994, picnic 2001. I will have to remember.
Which I won’t. And all the memories will be lost.
As Marc Kosciejew writes in this issue’s cover story, physical matter may be more permanent than digitised content. And that’s because as technology changes, formats and applications become obsolete and data becomes irretrievable. It’s the same with online information. Most of the websites published in the 1990s are nowadays dead and their links broken. And the same will happen with whatever you posted online yesterday. How long will it last? Five years? Maybe. And then, it will be lost and forgotten.
Incidentally, Sony has just announced that next year, it will stop producing Betamax video cassette tapes. Launched in the late 1970s, the Betamax format lost the war to VHS. In turn, VHS made way to DVD. It’s a cycle, with new formats rendering old ones obsolete, and then becoming obsolete themselves.
True, that is the essence of progress. But it’s also what makes bit rot the greatest danger for our generation. Because if we don’t preserve our story, we will be forgotten.
techeditor@timesofmalta.com