Since the dawn of physical media, the written illustrations, words and eventually photographs and movies created by each generation suffered the inevitable deterioration of the physical world, lending authenticity through their “old and worn” look. A book page printed 500 years ago looks older than one printed a decade ago, its paper yellowed and brittle, its cover perhaps leather and gilded to today’s paperback. A photograph from a century and a half ago, printed on stiff cardboard, its greyscale silver imagery shimmering in the light, looks its vintage compared to a vibrant color photograph taken in the 1990’s. Indeed, rare colorized imagery from a century ago somehow doesn’t look its age, reminding us how important the aging of physical media is to our interpretation of the age of the content it contains. What happens in a digital world in which our words and images no longer age?
Cartoonists Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott once remarked that “old traditional photos looked like they were old – faded, discolored, worn. When you saw your young self in them, there was a real sense of elapsed time … now with digital photos, everything looks like it was taken yesterday, even though it was ten years ago.” There is real truth to their commentary.
Since the dawn of humans leaving a permanent illustrated record, the mediums through which we have expressed ourselves have suffered the ravages of time. Whether a cave painting, papyrus scroll, book page, newsprint or photograph, everything we create ages over time.
Museums, archives and library stacks convey a palpable sense of the passage of time through the aging and wear and tear of the items they present. A pristine and perfectly preserved color photograph from a century ago somehow doesn’t feel as “old” as a worn and time-ravaged silver print that vividly conveys the passage of time since its creation.
The digital age entirely eliminates the effects of time and usage on the media we consume. A digital image captured 20 years ago looks no different than the day it was captured, even if it has been viewed hundreds of millions of times in the interim. There is simply no record of its age or handling in its later existence.
An image taken today likely will look no different than one taken a century from now, absent major advances in the capture of three-dimensional imagery and high dynamic range. Viewed by a future inhabitant of Earth in 2119, the image will show no effects of age or viewership.
What does it mean to have content that is liberated of the constraints of its physical container? When an image’s age can no longer be instantly recognizable or faithfully determined through testing?
Digital imagery has created a particular conundrum for the authentication of imagery. Physical artifacts could be tested through chemical and physical laboratory processes to definitively determine their age to a particular range of years without question. A digital image lacks such authoritative aging tests, meaning its precise date of capture cannot be scientifically determined in most cases.
Educated guesswork based on sensor and compression artifacts and embedded file metadata can shed some light on an image’s age, but these processes are not absolute guarantees in the way a chemical test could definitively age a physical photograph.
As “vintage” filters proliferate in the world of digital photography, it is becoming increasingly difficult even to determine whether a claimed digitization of a historical photograph is in fact merely a modern photograph that has been digitally aged.
Putting this all together, a byproduct of the digital world has been the separation of content and container, in which the mediums through which we preserve our societal record no longer definitively record the passing of time or the wear and tear of access. Moments in time are captured in immutable form that never ages and never changes no matter how much they are viewed.
How will this impact future generations when images of the far past look like they were taken today and it is impossible to tell a genuine historical image from a modern forgery?
In the end, as we look back someday on the impact of the digital world, perhaps we will fondly remember a time when our words and images aged much like the events they depicted, gradually fading away, rather than being preserved forever as a moment in time.
