All Data Becoming Digital
There are people alive today who have never seen a VHS tape, all they’ve ever known is the digital era of data storage. Even what was once the most popular ways of recording information, on paper and on printed photographs, is becoming less popular, thanks to the speed and simplicity their digital alternatives offer.
What possible dangers could arise from continuing this trend of data storage? Well there’s the risk of increasingly advanced technology becoming incompatible with today’s hardware. This is something we’re seeing now with data which was stored on cassette and floppy disks in the eighties. There’s also the danger of the all the hard drives being wiped – it can be a lot easier to delete some digital data than destroy the physical version. And what if, far into the future, kids are taught to type instead of write? Will pencils and pens disappear completely? Could the next DaVinci’s tools be a mouse instead of a paintbrush?