Digital revolution
The Digital Revolution started in the last decades of the 20th century. It was a transition from the storage of information on fixed material objects dedicated to specific purposes (books for words, phonograph records or audio cassettes for sound, film for images), to the storage of all information in a binary digital format, which is readily stored on a variety of media. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely.
Technological basis
Underlying the digital revolution was the development of the digital electronic computer, the personal computer, and particularly of the microprocessor which enabled computer technology to be embedded into a huge range of objects from cameras to personal music players. Equally important was the development of transmission technologies including computer networking, the Internet and digital broadcasting.
Socio-economic impact
to be written...
Concerns
While there have been huge benefits to the digital revolution, especially in terms of the accessibility of information, there are a number of concerns.
For those living in the present, the digital revolution has ushered in an new age of mass surveillance, generating a range of new civil and human rights issues.
From the perspective of the historian, a large part of our history is known through physical objects from the past that have been found or preserved, particularly in written documents. Although digital information is easily created, it is also fragile and easily deleted or destroyed. Changes in storage formats can make recovery of data difficult or near impossible, as can the storage of information on obsolete media for which reproduction equipment is unavailable, and even identifying what such data is and whether it is of interest can be near impossible if it no longer easily readable, or if there is a large number of such files to identify. These problems are further compounded by the use of digital rights management and other copy protection technologies which, being designed to only allow the data to be read on specific machines, may well make future data recovery impossible. Interestingly, the Voyager Golden Record, which is intended to be read by an intelligent extraterrestrial (perhaps a suitable parallel to a human from the distant future), is recorded in analog rather than digital format specifically for easy interpretation and analysis.
See also
