Feb 13, 2020
I'm on r/askhistorians because #research lol and I found this random conversation... did you know digital media files deteriorate over time? Digital archaeologists are not focused solely on mining through the infinite amount of data on the internet, they are currently focused on ways to preserve digital databases and files to prevent loss as the physical products are decaying.
That's crazy to me and I never thought of it, I thought of digitization as like, forever-preservation. If you have a picture of it, it's forever, but I guess even photos deteriorate over time. It's just wild to me, the coding breaks down like a living thing and evolves and changes and breaks and it's just so crazy, I never thought of it that way!