Digital dark age

The digital dark age is a popular phrase for a feared near-future in which historians lack readable records of early twenty-first-century life because Born-digital materials were never preserved, formats became obsolete, or keys and platforms disappeared. The metaphor is used rhetorically by librarians and technologists to motivate Digital preservation.

Status

The phrase is a warning, not a prediction that all digital culture will vanish. Large public efforts—the Internet Archive, national web archives, institutional repositories—already mitigate loss, though coverage remains uneven and Link rot continues on the live web.

See also

• File format obsolescence
• Bit rot
• Cultural memory

Sources

• Popular and professional essays on the digital dark age motif.
• Counterpoints emphasising existing web archives (Internet Archive milestones).