科技时代,记忆何处安放?
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别再指望几十年后你那些长大成人的孙辈们还能看到你现在为他们拍摄的录像了。建议你还是采用老式的方法――拿起数码相机，拍下静态的照片，用优质的墨在高品质的相纸上打印出来，然后放入相册里。
A few weeks ago, as I was rummaging1) in a drawer in my father’s house, I came across a dozen reels of developed 8-millimetre film. I’d known the reels were in the house somewhere. But, for many years, I’d resolutely put the fact out of my mind. The films contained clips of my family in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not long before my mother became gravely2) ill. Over the intervening decades I hadn’t had the heart to3) look at them.
But, this time, I packed the films into a shoebox and took them to someone who specializes in converting old films into digital form. Within a week, I had all the clips on a DVD and was showing them to my wife and two young children. There I was―three years old―with my mother and father playing on the swing set4) outside my childhood home near Victoria, learning to swim with my mother, hunting for Easter eggs with her in the field and forest nearby.
It was one of the first occasions that my children had seen images of their grandmother, and the first time I’d seen anything other than a still picture of her since I was 13. Even without sound, the emotional impact was inexpressible. It was as if I’d stepped into a time-travel machine and shot more than 50 years into the past.
We all want to capture happy family moments so we can relive them again in later years. But half a century is a really long time. Will any of today’s family digital recordings last that long? Will today’s children be able to see videos of themselves taken now in, say, 2070? These holidays, as we reach for the digital camera or video recorder, we assume they will―but we’re probably wrong.
I love technology just as much as the next person5), but we have a real problem here. Today’s information technology is creating what we might call an Age of Ephemera6). Our unprecedented ability to store and transfer gargantuan7) amounts of information obscures this information’s modern fragility.
Two factors are at play. The first is what people in the business call “media decay.” The physical material we use to store our information changes over time. Some materials deteriorate very slowly: Acid-free paper can last for 500 years, and the lifespan of archival-quality microfilm is about 200 years. But the kind of recordable CD on which most of us store our family photos can be unreadable in as few as five years, because the dyes in the CD’s recording layer fade, especially if the disk is stored in light.
The second and ultimately more serious factor is change in the hardware and software of the recording technology itself. Most of us have had the experience of coming across an old 5.25-inch computer floppy disk8), looking at it with amusement―or horror, if it contains important information―then throwing it into a wastebasket because we don’t know anyone with a machine that can read such a thing now. Even if the recording medium hasn’t deteriorated and still contains the data, the technology to translate that data into a useable form―such as words or pictures on a screen―may have largely disappeared.
Many of the information-storage technologies from the middle of the last century were far less vulnerable to these problems. My father’s house also contains boxes of thousands of my mother’s slide9) photographs of landscapes and wildlife. She used Kodak Ektachrome10) film and, after nearly 60 years, the colour in the slides is almost as accurate as the day the photos were developed. And I don’t need a complex and long-lost technology to see the photos―just a simple magnifying glass.
Even the device needed to “read” my 8-mm films―an old reel-to-reel projector―is relatively simple. It consists of lenses, sprockets11), belts and light bulbs, and it can be maintained and used for decades by an artisan working in a small shop, such as the person I consulted to convert my films into digital form. It’s hard to imagine the same being true in 2070 of an iMac or PC manufactured today.
These problems are all well-known. The solution, we’re told, is to re-record or “migrate” our most important data every few years to new media or new technologies. But there’s a problem with this advice: We’re human. We get distracted, we forget, we get sick, we die. And before we know it, those precious family films and photos locked away in digital form are gone forever.
My advice? Forget about recording videos for your grandchildren to see when they’re adults decades from now. Use your digital camera to take still photographs, have them printed with good inks on high-quality stock12), and put them in a photo album―the old-fashioned way.
几个星期前，我在父亲家里的一个抽屉里翻找东西，偶然发现了12卷已经冲洗过的八毫米胶片。我早就知道这些胶片存放在房子的某个角落里，但多年以来，我却毅然决然地将这一事实抛诸脑外。这些胶片记录了20世纪50年代后期和60年代初期我们家的生活片段，在那之后不久，我的母亲就患了重病。后来的几十年里，我一直都不忍心去看这些胶片。
不过，这一次，我把胶片装进一个鞋盒，然后送到一个专业人士那里，请他把老胶片转成数码格式。不到一个星期，所有的录影片段都被储存到一张DVD上了。我把这些录影片段放给妻子和我两个年幼的孩子看。片子里的我才三岁，一会儿是和父母在维多利亚附近我儿时的老宅外面玩秋千，一会儿是跟着母亲学游泳，一会儿是和母亲一起在附近的田间和森林里寻找复活节彩蛋。
这是我的孩子们头一次看到他们祖母的影像，也是我自打13岁以来头一次看到她的影像，其间我只是看看她的一张静态照片而已。尽管影像中没有声音，我还是感到莫可名状的激动。我觉得自己仿佛步入了一台时空穿梭器，瞬间回到了五十多年前的过去。
我们都希望捕捉住家庭的幸福时刻，这样我们就可以在以后的岁月里重温。可是，半个世纪的时间真的很漫长，现在有哪个家庭的数字记录能保存那么久呢？今天的孩子到2070年的时候还能看到现在拍摄的影像吗？每逢节假日，当我们拿起数码相机或者摄像机拍摄的时候，我们以为将来能看到它们――但也许我们错了。
我和其他人一样热爱科技，但我们都面临一个现实存在的问题。当今的信息技术造就了一个时代，我们或许可以称之为“蜉蝣时代”。我们在储存和转移海量的信息方面具备了前所未有的能力，但这种能力却使我们无法看清信息在这个时代所呈现的脆弱性。
信息的脆弱性包含两个方面的因素。第一个因素是行业人士所称的“媒体介质衰变”。我们用于存储信息的物质材料会随着时间的推移发生变化。有的材料退化得非常慢：无酸纸张可以保存五百年，档案用缩微胶片的寿命约为两百年。可是，我们大多数人用来存储家庭照片的可刻录光盘可能仅仅五年的时间就不能读了，这是因为光盘刻录层的染料会褪色，尤其是光盘不避光保存的话。
第二个因素是录制技术本身软硬件的变化，这也是从根本上来看更为严重的一个因素。我们大多数人都有这样的经历：偶然间发现一张陈旧的5.25英寸计算机软盘，看着它，觉得很好笑――如果里面存有重要资料的话就是惶恐了――然后就随手扔进废纸篓里，因为我们不知道现在谁还会有可以读这玩意儿的机器了。即便录制介质没有变质，里面的数据仍然完好无损，但能把那些数据转成可用形式(比如可在屏幕上显示的文字或图片)的技术手段也大都消失殆尽了。
而对于上个世纪中期发展起来的一些信息存储技术而言，上述问题构成的威胁就小得多。我父亲的房子里还存放着好几个盒子，里面有数以千计的幻灯片，都是我母亲拍摄的风景照和野生动植物的照片。她用的是柯达埃克塔克罗姆系列胶卷，如今历时将近六十年，幻灯片几乎仍然保有冲洗当日的原色。而我要看这些照片，根本用不上什么复杂且遗弃已久的技术――一面放大镜足矣。
甚至用来“读”我那些八毫米胶片的设备也比较简单――一台老旧的胶片放映机即可。这种放映机由镜头、输片齿轮、传动带和灯泡组成，随便一个小作坊里的技工就能维护和使用数十年，比如我请其将我的胶片转成数码格式的那个人就可以。但我们很难想象，到了2070年，这样的事情会发生在今天生产的苹果电脑或普通个人电脑上。
这些都是众所周知的问题。我们被告知的解决办法是，隔几年就把我们最重要的数据重新录制或者“迁徙”到新的介质或新的技术产品上。但这个建议存在一个问题：我们都是人，注意力会分散，会忘事，会生病，会死去。在我们意识到之前，那些以数码形式束之高阁的珍贵家庭录影和照片已经一去不复返了。
要问我的建议？别再指望几十年后你那些长大成人的孙辈们还能看到你现在为他们拍摄的录像了。建议你还是采用老式的方法――拿起数码相机，拍下静态的照片，用优质的墨在高品质的相纸上打印出来，然后放入相册里。
1. rummage [ˈrʌmɪdʒ] vi. 到处翻寻
2. gravely [reɪvli] adv. 严重地
3. have the heart to (do sth.)：有勇气(做某事)
4. swing set：秋千
5. as much as the next person：与别人一样多
6. ephemera [ɪˈfemərə] n. [昆]蜉蝣。蜉蝣是目前已知的寿命最短的昆虫，因而该词常用来比喻生命短促的人(或物)。本文中的Age of Ephemera便是比喻数字时代的科技产品寿命很短暂。
7. gargantuan [ːˈæntʃuən] adj. 巨大的，庞大的
8. floppy disk：软盘
9. slide [slaɪd] n. 幻灯片，又称为正片或反转片，是一种透明胶片，可以通过投影的方式显示图像。
10. Ektachrome：埃克塔克罗姆彩色反转片，柯达公司旗下的一个胶卷品牌
11. sprocket [ˈsprɒkɪt] n. 输片齿轮，用于传输电影胶片。
12. stock [stɒk] n. 打印纸