Published on Sep 11, 2014

Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?

This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder by Ismail Serageldin, director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria, who is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge hub for the digital world.

Images as well as texts risk being lost in this ‘Digital Dark Age’. In an old McDonald’s restaurant in Mountain View, CA, retired NASA engineer Dennis Wingo is trying to retrieve the very first images of the moon. Upstate New York, Jason Scott has founded The Archive Team, a network of young activists that saves websites that are at risk of disappearing forever. In San Francisco, we visit Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive that’s going against the trend to destroy archives, and the Long Now Foundation, which has put the long-term back on the agenda by building a clock that only ticks once a year and should last 10,000 years, in an attempt to reconnect with generations thousands of years from now.

Directed by Bregtje van der Haak / produced by VPRO Backlight, The Netherlands

You can watch the Dutch episode here: http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2014-2015/digitaal-geheugenverlies.html

For broadcast rights: www.nposales.com / [email protected]. http://youtu.be/NdZxI3nFVJs

Category
News & Politics
License
Standard YouTube License


From the filmmaker:

Here is our documentary in HD  on YouTube, to be distributed,
screened, shared and embedded globally, without password (only
geo-blocked in the Netherlands):

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