In association to an article at darrenbarefoot.com, I was reminded of a topic I’ve brought up before (with little success in exciting anyone). We’re beginning a new era of the “Digitally Revolutionized Legacy,” but it’s not us – Generation X – as first thought. No, the new era starts with our children. I would say that most of us have little to no memory of the events in our lives prior to an age at which we started school. The rest of you probably can’t remember last week, let alone twenty some-odd years ago. However, this will all change for future generations. I’m excited to consider that my 1.5 year-old, when my age, will have a real wealth of resources documenting his every move until I get tired of looking at him (probably in close proximity to puberty). What’s unfathomable about this is that the number of children with this chronological essay is very large. I don’t know that this will change how our children develop, but I feel as though it does change them. Whether we recognize this or just take it all for granted, it seems as though our legacies will have an opportunity for generational memory. Between the A/V capture of their lives to the vast archival wasteland of the Internet, our children will be wiser than we were. You can probably already see that in some families, but not on a big scale just yet. Of course, Darren has dashed my hopes of this futuristic society with some recent articles of his:
From what I can discern, there is dispute over the RAW format used by most cameras, but JPEG’s are still holding strong. Of course, there is the PNG format and JPEG-2000, which to my knowledge, is really only minimally supported. Because of the vast effects of deprecating the number one compressed image format, I’m betting that the JPEG format is handled by computers for decades to come. Though with the leaps and bounds technology breakthroughs happening these days, one can never be too sure.