Digital Dark Age

Digital Dark Age

My iPad won’t come back!

My first doubts as to the longevity of computers were cast in the 1990s when my favourite game ‘Myst’ no longer worked after Microsoft updated its Windows operating system. Since then, an increasing number of my programmes have been rendered useless by the ‘advance’ of technology. And anyone who has been Secretary to a community group will know how quickly their groups laptops have fallen into ‘clunkiness’.

My concerns were recently reinforced when I read that Vint Cef, a Google Vice President, is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost as hardware and software become obsolete. He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a “digital Dark Age”. Our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information – on our hard drives or in “the cloud”. But as technology moves on, they risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.

So what will we do if we can’t ‘google it’? My wife will be lost without Doctor Google to confirm her diagnoses; my Facebook will become friendless; my Twitter world will fall silent.

More worringly, as our present digital storage expands, so we are eliminating our more conventional hard-copy storage.

Will all that will remain of our lives be a black screen?

Maybe, after all,  the Aborigines had the right idea with their cave art.

Aboriginal cave art

Hanging Rock

 

During my recent visit to Victoria, I finally made my long awaited trip to the famed Hanging Rock in the Macedon Ranges, an hour’s drive north of Melbourne. Often, unrequited expectation can lead to disappointment, but 40 years after seeing Peter Weir’s famous film “Picnic at Hanging Rock” the place still excited me. Our visit coincided with the monthly country markets, which made the car park very crowded, even utilizing the racetrack whose first race meeting was held on New Year’s Day in 1877 and which is still being used for three meetings a year.

In 1968 Joan Lindsay first published her book “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, which led to Peter Weir’s atmospheric film in 1975. The book relates the unexplained disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher at Hanging Rock during a picnic on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900. Peter Weir said: “What intrigued me about the mystery was that there was no solution. Joan Lindsay would never say whether it was true or not and newspaper files of the day tell of no such tragedy.“ True or not, Hanging Rock inspires the imagination. A dream within a dream. It rises as a monolith from the surrounding cultivated farmlands, and challenges us to climb to its summit. In the quiet of the afternoon, and in between my puffing as I paused to get my breath, I could still easily conjure up the sound of haunting pan pipes, and the dreadful scream for the lost Miranda. However, unlike the fated school group, all of our company returned safely back from our climb. I even claimed to have discovered the lost Miranda, when I pointed out wife, Phyllis, to passing climbers (even though she would have been 130 years old, and Phyllis doesn’t even remotely look that age!) Still the memory of Hanging Rock remains. I wonder if the Wurundjeri Tribe in their long forgotten Dreamtime held Hanging Rock in the same awe as I did today. Perhaps I was merely influenced by Peter Weir’s film. or was it as the Illustrated Melbourne Post had so succinctly put it in 1863:“…in the present keenness of our sensibilities there is infinite pleasure and relief in the contemplation of what if primeval.”