Digitizing heritage does not guarantee lasting preservation.
The Fragility of Digital Memory: Will Our Digital Heritage Vanish?
As we intensify efforts to digitize our heritage and knowledge in museums and cultural institutions, a fundamental question arises: does this digital memory, which we imagine to be eternal, risk disappearing faster than the media it claims to replace? Could our digital archives one day vanish like the Library of Alexandria? Projects like Time Machine Europe, bringing together actors such as Arte and the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, embody this race for digital archiving, but the technical, energy, and cultural questions they raise are immense.
Beyond the technological allure, essential issues emerge. What heritage do we select to digitize and preserve? What criteria guide these choices, and what are their social and cultural consequences? Digitization, often presented as a neutral technical solution, is in reality profoundly influenced by political and institutional decisions, which implicitly define what deserves to be preserved and transmitted. While we are massively digitizing to save from oblivion, this digital memory seems threatened by the very fragility of the technology supposed to preserve it.
For, despite its promise of eternal memory, digitization reveals significant vulnerabilities linked to rapid technological obsolescence. Who today can reread a floppy disk or a CD-ROM, yet presented as revolutionary only a few decades ago? In December 2020, the definitive disappearance of Adobe’s Flash Player made a considerable amount of interactive content inaccessible, such as educational games, pedagogical animations, and digital creations. Zip drives, very popular in the 2000s for their significant capacity at the time, are now unusable due to a lack of compatible readers. These concrete examples highlight the intrinsic fragility of digital technology and remind us that its ideal of durable conservation is far from being achieved.
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