We’re rapidly approaching an oral culture. The fluidity of the Web seems to have many aspects of an oral culture in terms of how we can interact with so much of it in a non-literate manner - think videos, audio,…

The Kroeber Anthropology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus used to keep an assortment of old audio players in order to able to play recordings in obsolete formats. Similarly, the now-defunct library at Apple Computer tried to hold onto at least one of every computer Apple made as well as every software release they could in order to be able provide access to data and functions that would otherwise be lost.

In the 1970s, the BBC discarded a lot of their old tapes. Thousands of hours of TV programming was lost forever, although occasional kinescope prints turn up.

In Martinsville, Indiana, there used to be a phonograph museum which had the only known recording of Kaiser Wilhelm II on a wax cylinder. One day, a truck crashed into the front of the museum and destroyed it.

Really, the 20th century as a whole represents one of the single greatest losses of cultural data in human history. To our knowledge, there had never been a civilization before ours which was able to literally preserve almost every facet of life in image and sound and thousands upon thousands of hours of our history have been lost forever through discarded home movies, educational and industrial films, amateur recordings, newsreels, academic films, and so on. Thankfully to to the efforts of people like Rick Prelinger (whose collection can be seen at archive.org), some of these films and sounds are being preserved, but so many questions about the last century could have been answered with some of these recordings and films. Now many never will be.

One more story, this one more positive- During the silent era, many films were copyrighted by printing out each frame on a page and sending a bound copy to the Library of Congress. Through this, many films whose nitrate stock had degrade to the point of being a total loss were saved this way. I think it might be a worthy project to continue this idea with relevant film footage.

There are two made-for-TV documentaries which provide a devastating critique of the fragility of the human record.

“Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record” (01987) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287709/ deals with what’s happening to paper archives and a follow-up study “Into the Future: Information in the Electronic Age” (01996) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0179245/ is perhaps even more surprising since so many of us assume digital=forever.

It’s been years since I saw either but I remember one episode described a database of toxic sites compiled by the U.S. government that is no longer readable by any available computer system.

I don’t know where you can see these — Netflix doesn’t list them — but they are well-worth viewing.