Is culture a better file format than digital?

My parents kept the same 27-inch Sony Trinitron tube TV for more than twenty years. Today, last year's flat panel is considered a dinosaur.

I usually write about technology and digital transformation. This one starts there and ends up somewhere more touchy-feely. Bear with me.

The shrinking lifespan of tech

There's a clear trend in technology: each generation of a product lasts a shorter time than the one before. Moore's Law pushes tech further and faster while, ironically, making it obsolete sooner.

It applies to everything. Programming languages, network protocols, file formats, phones, and televisions.

A 900-year-old book outlasted a 15-year-old disc

In 1986, the BBC marked the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror's great survey of England, with an ambitious digital sequel. More than a million people contributed text, photographs, and maps, all stored on specially made laser discs.

Within about fifteen years, those discs were nearly unreadable. The players had died out, and it took a team of specialists to rescue the contents.

The original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, can still be read today.

Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the internet, has warned that we risk a "digital dark age" for exactly this reason.

Culture spans centuries

By contrast, the master works of art, music, sculpture, literature, and architecture survive the passage of centuries. They speak to us about the life and times of a distant past, and they give us a deep connection to the people who lived it.

Not long ago, my wife surprised me with a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Colorado Symphony. I'm no expert, but I couldn't pick out a single mistake. I enjoyed every second.

Vivaldi published those four concertos in 1725. It boggles the mind that a piece of art can cross almost three centuries and arrive unchanged.

What humbled me, though, was the musicians. Every one of them got to that stage through daily, incremental progress over a lifetime. And that's the part worth noticing. The Four Seasons has survived on paper, but it lives because each generation of players commits to learning it again.

I've been rude about cathedrals elsewhere. I take some of it back.

So let me pose the question. Is culture a better file format than digital? Did we already invent the durable way to store what matters, in the images and feelings the arts provoke?

What this means at work

Your organization will replace its systems several times in your career. So what carries knowledge across those replacements?

Part of the answer is technical. Keep the records that matter in open, widely used formats, and plan to move them forward. Preservation is a job somebody has to own.

The larger part is culture: how your organization does things, the stories about why, and the habits one person hands to the next. When a system is retired, whatever lived only inside it is lost. Whatever lived in how people work carries over.

The question stands

I don't have a tidy answer. But it's worth noticing that the things we've kept the longest were never stored in the newest format.

This article grew out of two posts that first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.