When people talk about the Greek Dark Ages, the word “dark” refers to the few written sources that historians have available to piece together the time period. Of course, this does not mean that nothing happened in this period, but rather, systems of written language like Linear B disappeared. Historians today piece together the time period from oral sources written down later and archaeological evidence. Life in the Dark Ages still continued, but most of that story is difficult to understand, as none of that information was recorded in a durable way.
When we contrast the Dark Ages in Greece to our records today, we seem to be in a pretty good place. We go as far as to call our own time period the Information Age. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before, and our digital records of the present seem unlimited. If you have a phone, it probably has at the very least a thousand images and videos on it. We have digital notes, essays from past classes, correspondence with friends and family. Moreover, entire companies can profit from our internet activity because they are able to collect our data and sell our consumer profiles to third parties. We can find out about an event that is going on halfway across the world minutes after it happens, then go online and have a debate with a handful of people hundreds of miles away from us about its implications.
Future historians, in theory, should have no problem piecing together our contemporary period. However, the quantity of information produced does not mean that the information will be preserved.
When I think back to technology from even 20 years ago, much of it seems pretty inaccessible. In 2006, many people were still using VHS tapes, and DVDs were just starting to become a more common way to watch films. Today, working VHS players are difficult to find, and DVD players are becoming increasingly uncommon. While major movies may have been able to travel to streaming services, thousands of home videos, indie movies and other visual records are essentially lost. The only piece of technology that I still use from 2006 is my family’s Wii which, thankfully, is still going strong.
Today, flash drives can become corrupted, and even cloud storage relies on corporations and energy-intensive infrastructure that may not exist indefinitely. Just because so much of our lives exist online, whether we like it or not, does not guarantee that information will exist into the future. Digital records require constant maintenance in specific ways that physical records like the clay tablets in Mycenaean Greece, parchment or books generally do not.
My point is that I think it is unlikely that we will be referred to as the age of information for very long. Fifty years from now, historians and archivists might have problems accessing information from our time period. One hundred years from now, the internet as we know it may not exist, making most of the digital information we produce today inaccessible. One thousand years from now, if humans are still around, archaeologists studying past civilizations may discover that the stratum of the 21st century will be nothing but a layer of plastics, with little contextual evidence that could describe our lives today at all.
This is an issue discussed by archivists and historians today, and maintenance of digital records has become a subfield of archiving in itself. However, preservation should not be left solely to governments and institutions that are putting in the work to preserve digital records. History is also built from individual people living everyday lives.
If we want future ages to understand our own, we need to rethink how we store and share our own information and digital lives. Maybe this means backing up our important files and photos we want to keep and supporting local libraries and archives that work to preserve digital documents. It may mean printing out photos, handwriting letters more often and keeping other important parts of our lives in some sort of physical format as well as digital. Maybe it means being careful about how much of our lives we entrust to private companies with no obligation to keep that information forever.
Thankfully, we have not experienced a civilization collapse like the one that preceded the Greek Dark Ages, but the existence of “dark” ages throughout history shows us that our time period may not have as secure a place in history as we might think.
