The Future of Looking Back is a small book that delivers a big message on how to preserve personal values in today’s tech society.
Part 1, Stuff and Sentimentality, considers why we keep things and how to transfer them from physical to digital objects
Part 2, A Digital Life, where we take technology for granted
Part 3, New Sentimental Things, is about how to capture things and how to let them go.
We wouldn’t have seen a book on this topic even just ten years ago. Ours is a time of unprecedented change, in a world of rapid technological innovation, and we are in charge of preservation.
We are reminded that the future we get is the one we design. We should give as much thought to the legacy we will leave behind as we do to the one we inherit. How will we create and preserve digital history? This topic is of special interest to those who create and can influence the design of all things tech.
Take digital images: they might seem like permanent archives but they are as subject to obsolescence as cassette tapes and VHS family home movies. For all its advantages this is still an impediment to true permanence. Just as we trash MP3 players year after year, and upgrade devices that blend our personal, social, and work history, we confuse upgrading with sliding too far past recovery. We may find our stuff is too far gone to allow us to catalog, sort, and find the relevant bits we want to preserve, as we run out of physical space for objects.
The need to adopt digital means to preserve physical objects and memories makes us think about what we keep out of sentiment, obligation, or a desire to preserve the past.
Author Richard Banks works as a Microsoft researcher and has written this guide after giving a lot of thought to preserving archives from his father and grandfather. We learn through his personal experiences, as he puzzles over what media of today can possibly serve as a record he can leave behind for his baby daughter.
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