I do listen to NPR on our local station WWNO and I frequently access their website. NPR recently posted a feature about the New York Public Library’s making almost 200,000 high-res images available online. As one commenter said: “Terrific, another collection of interesting things for me to blow hours on. Curse you internet!” I tend to agree: check out this really cool photo of Canal Street.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle in having just about everything online, instead of in a hard copy. There’s even a name for it: the digital dark age.

I even found a definition of it in Wikipedia: “The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia,because they have been recorded in an obsolete  and obscure file format. The name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a relative lack of written record.”

You know, that’s pretty damned scary. There are all kinds of predictive doomsday scenarios where the electric grid we use is damaged and/or we lose electricity altogether.

How many of us have all the photos we’ve taken of friends, family, events, etc. in hard copy? I know I don’t. What about all the information that’s generated on a daily basis on the internet, also not in hard copy? What about newscasts on television on tape or digital formats that could never again be accessed without electricity? Freaky and scary to think about.

Newsman Ted Koppel just wrote “Lights Out,” a book describing a cyberattack on our electric power grid, and how we are so inadequately prepared for such a thing.

I’m not trying to be alarmist, but it truly bothers me that we’ve become so entwined with technology and its dependence on electricity that we could lose our history.

That’s a really awful thought when we think about music too. Yes, we used to have records so long ago (well, not that long ago, and the little suckers are coming back into favor again). And then we also used to have gramophones that could play records without the benefit of electricity. No more. You want music; you get it online.

Remember Katrina, 10 years ago, and what our lives were like with electricity for weeks?

Businesses suffered of course, but think about what could happen to your photos, your history, your music?

I say bring back those gramophones.