Lost HIstories

I'm old. I remember a time when computers were new and everyone was talking about how much time they would save us.....

Computers have made lots of tasks easier and more efficient but they have created some problems along the way. My biggest concern is that we are losing our heritage and memories with all this computer usage. Specifically our pictorial history and our written history. I'm not talking about national or world histories but the histories of our families. We store everything on zip drives, CD's, hard drives and we pride ourselves that we have eliminated whole closets full of boxes of pictures and papers.

Again, I am old. I remember when we put all of our music on 8-track tapes, then cassette tapes. How many of you can even play that music now. What about the VCR home movies we made with those huge, old cameras? Do you even know what a floppy disc is? Each of these technologies have become outdated and replaced, eliminating our ability to access that information. Now it's all on smart phones and computers, but what happens when they are outdated and upstaged by new technology? Will we be able to access those memories?

I have a box of pictures and papers that I have kept from my grandmother. In it are pictures of her parents, grandparents and siblings. There are pictures of my mother as a baby, child and young adult. Pictures of family vacations taken in funny old cars. There are scenes of family get-togethers with old fashioned clothes. These are old black and white photos but they are as clear as the day they were taken. I can look at them without special equipment and I can pass them on to my children. Will we be able to do that fifty years from now with the digital media we have now? Will our grandchildren or great-grandchildren have any way to remember us or know what our lives were like?

I shudder for the generations to come who will lose these connections to the past. If my computer crashes I will have lost many precious pictures of Christmas, birthdays, babies, trips and friends. Unless I have stored them on a zip drive or CD, that may or may not be readable in the future. My simple box of pictures has been passed down for three generations with no instructions needed. Maybe technology has moved us too far this time.

It's important to know where you came from before you can know where you are going.