Visual Communications
Aimee Lydon
A digital dark age
It is an irony of the digital age that, a time when we are used to having easy access to seemingly endless information and knowledge, so much of it is disappearing into a digital black hole. People’s thoughts and experiences are increasingly recorded on websites, Tweets and other social media rather than in the diaries and letters which have survived from the past. Given the ease with which websites can be updated, the lifespan of anything that is written online is considerably shorter than the printed word.
We have no guarantee that anything made of ones and zeros will be usable, or even readable, in another 50 years. We currently are at risk of a possible future situation where very little of our generation’s history remains due to the loss of digital information. ‘A digital dark age’ is a once-off exploratory zine that delves into the factors that are driving us to lose our personal histories to the great digital void.