Are We Doomed To Lose All Our Precious Memories Of This Generation?

These days if you want to show someone a picture of your child, or a family outing - you take to Facebook or Twitter to pull up the picture. Five years from now, what if we couldn't access those pictures anymore?

It seems like we all live on social media sites. All your memories, photos - everything is on the computer somewhere. What if Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram stop working? What if the software for these programs become outdated?

Remember floppy disks? That was the technology. You saved papers, files, whatever on these guys, and it was the greatest thing. Have you looked closely at a computer lately? There is no drive for floppy disks. It's an obsolete form of technology. The same holds true for 8-tracks, cassettes, and VHS. (These days, all those home movies get recorded on phones - and put onto Facebook).

Google Vice President Vint Cerf talks about a 'forgotten generation' with all our keepsakes on technological devices/sites that may cease to exist in the future. Rolling Stone Magazine reports,

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole," [Cerf] said to The Guardian. “We digitize things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artifacts that we digitized.

Cerf says if we really care about the pictures we take, we need to print them out. Same goes for the memories - they should be written down somewhere, not just sitting on social media sites.

The big problem is we need computer software that would let us access these old programs after they become obsolete. Unfortunately, there isn't a push for people to work on such a project.

For now, we'll continue to use our Facebook and Instagram for a collection of our photos and memories. In the meantime, if there's something you really want to keep forever - your best bet would be to get a hard copy of it.

[Rolling Stone Magazine]