So inspired by this thread, i got to thinking what have we “lost” as a culture. As in, right now in July 2025, what is the most important bit of our culture (however you define ‘our culture’ and ‘important’) that only exists in digital form and is no longer physically written down or printed
I mean all laws, legal or political proceedings, newspapers, books, and scientific papers still exist in paper form AFAIK?
It needs something specific, not just Twitter or Facebook, it has to be a specific account or post (I’d say most, if not all, of the really important social media posts would have been recorded in a newspaper article?)
Audiovisual media is a bit of a gray area but I’d say actual film, or analogue magnetic tape, count as “physical” but digital media like CD, DvD, blueray, etc. do not.
IMO is the answer to this a computer program or something related like a chip design. E.g
the UNIX operating system, which all smartphones and Macs are based on, is a massive part of our culture (almost impossible to understand our culture without it IMO) but only exists in electronic form. Though what is the first version UNIX that only existed electronically? I imagine the early versions like Multics have actually had their source code printed out and stored somewhere? Similarly for chips, older CPUs actually exist as a design on paper somewhere, but the design of newer CPUs or GPUs only exists electronically?
I don’t know how you define “our culture”, if it is meant to be also “our times”, but there are a lot of lost movies from the last 120 years, some considered masterpieces.
Though again i was thinking stuff that exists but only in digital, not physical, form. Though probably most TV counts, i assume TV companies are no longer archiving their programs as physical tapes or film? Possibly movies too, especially if I’m ruling out DVD (maybe that’s too conservative? Its still a physically encoding). Are people still making video tapes? Could i get the new Superman film on VHS?
Ok, that’s almost all of modern software, code, executables and data. The last time I printed out code was for my diploma thesis more than 30 years ago, everything I wrote after that only exists in digital form (or doesn’t exist anymore at all).
Missed the edit window but clearly the OPer had no idea what he was doing when he said DVDs and CDs don’t count. They count as they are a permanent (or as permanent as paper records,) recording, even if DVD players are extinct they could be decoded
Yeah so what is the first really important bit of software that only exists electronically? E.g. maybe DOS was but Windows was not, or Windows 3 was but not NT?
The irreplaceable artifacts the Taliban destroyed, most famously the Buddhist statues, exist now only as photographic records. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking of?
No because the records we have of that are on paper (and probably video tape?) somewhere. e.g. that physical Issue of the Guardian is sitting in a library somewhere. There is a whole other potential thread of stuff that existed long enough to be recorded photographically but no longer exists, but that’s not this one
I’m talking about records that have been “lost” in the sense that it only exists electronically, if we suddenly lost the ability to access computerized information it would be gone for ever.
Do they really last for hundreds of years, still readable?
It’s my impression that they become unreliable long before that. And in any case, how could we know that they’re good for hundreds of years when no example has existed for anywhere near that long?
– this site
discusses various issues and concludes that depending on the disc they may last 10 years to maybe over 100 for high quality discs kept in good storage conditions; and should be restested every 5 to 10 years to check. Paper records on decent quality paper in good storage, or in many cases even in just passable storage, can last a lot longer than that.
No but then most paper doesn’t either. Written records generally have to be copied to survive more than a few centuries. Though that’s a different issue, for the purposes of this thread I’m just interested in what is physically recorded, not how long those physical recordings will last.
I’m probably tired, but do you mind clarifying if you mean
Stuff that was once in analog form, but is now only available digitally
or
Stuff that has ever only been made digitally?
And I don’t think that operating systems or hardware design really qualify as culture. Certainly enabler of culture, though.
The storage conditions can be highly important. I always tell people to avoid “heat, light, and air”. Heat: room temps or less; light: keep in a box or cabinet; and air: best in a closed environment – again, box or cabinet.
I probably should add humidity, as high humidity can cause mold and worse.
Nicholas Baker, in his book “Double Fold” Amazon.com describes 19th century newspapers that had full color Sunday comics. Despite popular opinion that they are crumbling to dust, he was able to preserve them with the proper care. This is important, because libraries that microfilm such, then discard the originals, are not a reliable method of preservation. Older microfilm was poor quality, not color, and sometimes deteriorated faster than the paper originals.
Patent databases have pretty much all been converted from paper to electronic files. I don’t know if the older ones are still in storage somewhere, but going forward, the vast majority of patent applications and issued patents will only be digital.
In the digitalization craze we are living in, untold masses of physical records of most every subject one can think of are being hauled to the dump, leaving only a digital file, if that.