Modern Technology
by
B. Dear
It's
the year 2800. Two men, while digging up some ground in the area that
used to be Washington D.C. unearth a few beautiful statues,
architectural structures, and tombstones. They report their find, and a
research team is called in. The team hopes to uncover clues
that may reveal some information about a long forgotten civilization
that used to occupy this space.
Other than some cryptic etchings in the granite buildings, they
understand little about this civilization that once lived here. Very
little archaeological evidence exists to truly understand how they
lived. They speculate as to how these people lived, how they
interacted, what they thought, but don't have much concrete information
to work with.
The reason for this is that these people went
digital.
There was no more paper or books. No more stone tablets. These people's
lives where recorded in bits and bytes. Momentary pixels on a screen.
What these pixels may have represented has been long forgotten.
They lived in a
time of instant messages, emails, and online storage. Many of these
messages were promptly deleted by the users
themselves. Accounts were deleted over time due to inactivity.
Online storage deleted the old to make space for the new.
The equipment that this information was stored on quickly morphed
through various standards and formats. When the equipment became old,
it was discarded and lost it's ability to provide usable data in a
short very short amount of time. This equipment had many small,
delicate parts that didn't hold up well over time. None of this
mattered though because the newer, faster equipment could not interact
with it anyway. It had become completely obsolete. The equipment was
left to break down and it's many digital photographs, documents, and
video were lost forever.
All was not lost. Some of this information was transferred over to new
formats. However, much of it wasn't very useful. It was mostly
entertainment media saved for its commercial value.
The small amount of information that stood the test of time was
questionable at best. This information was easily changed and rewritten
by many authors. This was done on a daily basis. Many of these people
had little to no expertise in the subjects they wrote about and spun
wild stories into the history to make it more interesting. A
version of the popular children's game," Whispering Lane" had
occurred on a massive scale turning facts into word-of-mouth legends.
The truth had been replaced by what people wanted it to be.
Trouble in the economy, coupled with rising energy costs and energy
sector corruption scandals, further threatened this electronic society.
People could no longer afford to use these machines as they once had.
It was getting increasingly difficult to afford maintaining
these machines forever, and thus preserve the small amount of
history that remained.
In time, this delicate mechanism fell apart and was no more.
|
|
|